Antinomy Minor

The Artistic Process

2008-08-23T17:36:48Z

One of my chronic laments, is how the coolest art-hacks seem to get the least amount of DVD extra, behind the scenes documentation. Make zine has changed that around quite a bit, and I'm happy to see another artist take up the challenge in a more mainstream forum.

Art Geeks tile their bathroom

Some days, it doesn't take much to make me very happy.

In defense of griping

2008-08-18T19:24:48Z

The Weekly's astrology column caught my eye today.

Sagittarius (Nov. 22–Dec. 21)

There's a time to get pissed off about the status quo, and a time to simply accept it. Determining which this is depends on you. You can change things if you want, although it might require tremendous effort. Are you willing to make that effort? Bitching and moaning about something without bothering to try to change it is a waste of time and energy. Don't bother. If you're going to let yourself get fired up, then you'd better be prepared to step up and put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, I advise just letting it go and keeping your mouth shut. Change it or live with it. No griping allowed.

Sounds really good, doesn't it? I can imagine the same advice being given to black Americans in the 60's in the south.

What if we were never allowed to talk things over with each other before acting? It would be like being invited to a brainstorm, but having every idea shot down before they could be written on the chalkboard.

It's true that a lot of chronic griping doesn't go anyplace, and there are some ways to talk about malcontent that are more productive than others. But those would be shades of gray that depend on how receptive one is to hearing the stuff in the first place. This astrologer is telling us that if we're not firmly committed to taking risks, we shouldn't talk about those risks before jumping. Fight Club would be proud.

I've got a different idea about complaints. We live in a really messed up place, at a really messed up time. A whole lot of things are going to change about our situation, whether we like it or not. Talking about fucked up things, and deciding how fucked up they are, is really important. When someone says, "Oh, you don't like it, what's *your* solution?" they are basically saying that this current situation is the best one possible, all other solutions must have been found wanting, because this one actually happened. Or really, they're probably saying it's too complicated and painful for them to think about, and they'd rather you not try to drag them into it.

I think things right now are worse than we like to talk about. Things are going to get worse still. If no one bothers to talk about how bad things are now, the chances of things improving all on their own seem pretty small. I don't trust the people who are running things, to know (or care!) what's best for me if I just keep my mouth shut and let them work. That really would be crazy.

there's a whole 'nother half to this, that somehow embraces the warm fuzzies, the rainbows and unicorn chasers, the stuff that makes the hassle worth enduring. But I'm kind of depressed these days, and I don't have a lot of attention myself for that kind of stuff. I'm too stubborn to quit, even when I don't have a better world in mind. That will have to be enough for now.

anansi133 @ 2008-08-16T08:15:00

2008-08-16T15:21:44Z

Imperial fleet week in San Francisco

http://current.com/items/89204971_death_star_over_san_francisco

It's a cool video that makes me squirm. No explosions, no one running around saying, "Oh My God!", just complacent acceptance of our imperial master's right to dominate the sky.

It's the same feeling I get when the Blue Angels take over the airspace above my city. I guess I should be grateful they're not bombing me, that I'm not really being terrorized, it's someone on the other side of the planet who's taking it in the shorts for the sake of low, low prices.

I kind of miss it when the Star Wars franchise was about bad guys and good guys going at it. Clearly, the bad guys have won.

Video: 2 year old reenacts scene from toy story

2008-08-08T03:28:08Z

I didnt really ROTFLMAO until about 1:15 into the scene...

How To Beat The Claw Game - Watch more free videos

nonspoilery BSG stuff

2008-08-03T20:13:38Z

I've been taking season four very slowly, but like a slow-motion car crash, I can't quite stop looking.

After watching chief Tyrol go through his own dark night of the soul in The Road Less Traveled, I realized what's so hard to watch for me. I hate to watch bad writing, but good writing can be just as bad if not worse. A storytelling friend of mine was telling me how much people like to hear that they are good. BSG tells us something different about ourselves. We are messed up beyond belief, and don't expect any help finding the good stuff that makes it all worth it, not in this series.

Good writing about bad people, oh yeah. I'm all set to watch Faith now.

New toy

2008-08-01T18:16:42Z

Explaining the new toy is probably redundant.

Truman Show Disorder

2008-07-25T20:19:21Z

Yeah, I heard about the guy who thought he was stuck in a GTA level, beating up motorists at random and taking their cars.

Now there's Truman Show disorder, somewhat more mundane, since it's less interactive, you're just on display.

I have to wonder exactly how much of it is in their heads, though. I'm not talking tin foil hat here, I'm talking about the stuff that's public knowledge.

Most everybody knows that feeling you get when you're being watched. It's not even explained in the movies, a character will say they feel like they're being watched, and the audience doesn't take that as a sign of mental illness.

And we know the phone company is allowed to break the law as long as its on behalf of the government. We just don't know how far that goes, or what kind of security agenda is being pursued here.

There's another angle to this too, where the big consensus-reality game that we all more or less agree is just a Very Important Game... the vague suspicion that it's really a sham, and we are actually doing something much weirder than we know. My favorite version of this, is that insurance greed and bureaucratic inefficiency are just a smokescreen for massive scale medical experiments in which americans are nearly-willing lab rats. But the global warming experiment, the grand terror experiment, or the information monopoly empire experiment all come pretty close.

Come to think of it, all my fantasies about revolution are really just fantasies about living in a world where I understood all the most important aspects of my own life, and the people around me are doing the same. We could even lose our bid, and I'd still get that sense of ownership.

Anyway, it's not merely the loss of privacy people are responding to, it's the loss of accountability- there's no way to interact with that which is doing the watching. The best thing about 9/11 for me is, I don't feel quite so alone anymore in my paranoia. I had about a 14 year head start on all that.

Franchise Killer

2008-07-25T17:47:26Z

How bad does Hellboy 2 suck? I think it sucks so badly that the usual spoiler-cut just doesn't apply. So if you still want to catch this turkey on the big screen after reading this, a little thing like knowing what happens isn't likely to stop you.

Let's start with the steampunk fairy angle. Oh, that part sounds cool all right, it's what tipped me over into finding a big screen to watch it. But it's not really clear what the filmakers have in mind when they talk about fairies. There's the cute insectoid version used to good effect in Pan's Labyrinth, but they have no guile, and no relation to anything else in the fey world. They're just a plot device that could have been any kind of swarming nasty beastie. Killer bees and rats have been used to better effect.

Then there's the fairies supposedly at the center of the film's "plot". There wasn't really anything very fairy-like about them. There was certainly a lot of borrowing from LOTR's elves, these guys are tall and pretty and pale and strong. But what makes fairies dangerous is not their physical prowess, but their trickiness. And there was nothing subtle or tricky about these fairies. It looked like the director wanted vampires when he did the over-the-top goth makeup design, with a little bit of Hellraiser's Pinhead grid pattern on the nose. But none of these design elements held together to say "fairy" to me.

And then there's the diabolical plot to take over the world with an army of robots. If you're going to do something that cliche, then you have to bring something that we haven't seen before. And I'm not talking about pretty CGI puppets! As it was, it *might* have made a little bit of sense, if it had been gnomes or dwarves making all the mechanical stuff happen, but our single hobgoblin spokesthing has nothing to do with the plot, except to move the heroes from one place to another.

The first Hellboy borrowed heavily from the horrific imagery of two world wars. The nazi sand-puppet clockwork critter was really scary not just for what it was, but also what it represented. In this film, there is absolutely no reference to german badasses, except for a lovable eccentric german accented sand puppet. We are clearly expected to forget everything we saw in the first movie.

And then, Oh No! When the inevitable happens, and the One Ring to Rule them All is finally wielded, and the Army that must not awaken is awoken, how do our heroes prevail against all odds? The villain, with no explanation or build up, inexplicably kills himself in the middle of the battle. I paid money to see this?

{and before I get a lot of pedantic "That's not what happened", I ask you-, is my version any worse than what we did see?)

...not to say that such logic plays any part in this film. It doesn't even work as mindless popcorn fare, because the writing is so bad, so clumsy, that nothing that happens on screen really makes sense.

I've gotten so spoiled by movie sequels that were as good or better than the first one, it was easy to forget everything I hate about bad sequels. Selma Blair and Ron Perlman are fun to watch, I just wish they'd been given something interesting to do.

Quotation marks that shouldn't be there

2008-07-23T16:47:13Z

Color me unsurprised, there's a whole blog devoted to one tiny slice of american engrish.

And here's a lovely page containing a remedy. Except, this is more about snark than improving things. And sometimes snark can help make things better, just that a little goes a long way. (besides, I imagine that the folks most likely to make this error are least likely to be internet savvy enough to find that page.)

I have an idea for an official looking infraction notice, the kind of joke sticker you put on someones car who's parked badly. Only it's issued by the grammar police, and it contains an authoritative sounding snippet from Webster's, that's written to a 4th grade reading level.

But that's as far as it goes, I don't want to write it. I'm too focused on trying to write to whatever grade reading level I'm stuck in.

Unclear on the concept [minor snark]

2008-07-21T18:29:17Z

Either I'm confused about something pretty basic, or someone else is. You be the judge.

I'm in the middle of browsing my friend's list, when out of nowhere, a dialog box obscures the middle of a friend's speaking about a delicate social matter. And if this were some more stupid malware trying to get me to click on porn, I wouldn't be that surprised.

But this is a message from my web browser, telling me that a fresh update is now suddenly available, and wouldn't I please like to erase all my open tabs and re-boot my browser so I won't have to endure the shame of running obsolete software for just one more minute?

Well, duh. I close the dialog box, and go back to reading. Except now, I'm out of the zone. I'm too irritated at the interruption to continue reading, and I'm not going to go back to it until I've posted something about it.

I have to go back to the EULA I clicked through to install the damn thing: Did I specifically give them permission to interrupt my web browsing experience at their discretion? I'm pretty sure there's a hold harmless clause in there somewhere, but if this were an episode of Boston Legal, I would take them to court over it. (except this being me, I would simply try to force them not to interrupt me in the middle of a read. I still like Firefox, just not when it takes on the bad habits of Those Other Guys(tm).)

Because Joss told me to.

2008-07-19T13:34:49Z

Let's see the fight club do this!

2008-07-14T18:45:01Z

Via BoingBoing, here's a method for demolishing buildings in Japan.

It makes the conventional American explosive method seem kind of cheap and show-offy in comparison.

I heart Google Sketchup

2008-07-08T22:05:25Z

R2Dalek, originally uploaded by anansi133.

This took me about 5 minutes to cobble together. And it shows, but so what?

story versus narrative

2008-07-07T19:33:36Z

[x-posted to civilenergetics

Disclaimer: I haven't looked these words up in Webster's yet. I kind of want to get my own version down before I defer to some authority figure.

Seems like the main difference I can think of, is that every story has a title. A story is about something. And the thing the story is about, is the most important thing about the story.

Narrative, though, is about the patterns that make up the story. It's the bit of algorithm that make the story possible. You can have a bunch of anecdotal stories that are about a bunch of different things, but all sharing the same narrative.

I notice the difference a lot when I hear people talk politics, and when I try to talk politics. When we try to talk politics with each other (instead of at each other) I usually notice that we're speaking from different frames, and it's time to talk about the frame instead of the picture. And people don't want to relinquish their authority over stuff they know about. I sure don't.

If every moment of time is unique from every other moment that's come before, and if evolution is constantly improving the world, then we are constantly moving into a time that's more important than any other time.

I really get this a lot when the topic goes to global threats, like greenhouse emissions. There's a sense of panic, of impending doom. Recently I heard someone talk about this in terms of "before it's too late".

And I tried to say, "what if it's already too late? Would that stop those of us who care from trying anyway?"

The story is about the end of the world. But the narrative is about doing the best you know how even when it's hopeless.

There's a micro-story in the Heinlein juvenile, Have Space Suit Will Travel, a parable about a smart frog and a stupid frog, both trapped in a butter churn. The smart frog quickly sees how hopeless it all is, and relaxes into death. The stupid frog panics, and kicks wildly until the milk turns to butter and gives him something solid to jump against, setting him free. Which sums up the narrative of the entire book. The protagonist doesn't succeed because he's smarter or more powerful than his opponents, he mostly just puts off failure long enough for something else to keep happening, long enough for someone else to come up with a plan.

When people talk about scary things like the end of the world, too often, it sounds like this:

"That trail you want to walk along is on the edge of a cliff, and there's no guard rail.

"Yeah, but once you get past the tricky part, it goes someplace really interesting"

"Do what you want, but until they put a guard rail up, I'm not going down that trail"

"Okay, I went on ahead, and guess what? There's a star fleet economy on the other side, and no more nation states, and robust nanotech with really challenging license requirements."

"Well, you just broke the rules by going where there's no guard rail, and I've seen what happens to people who fall off that trail. They join cults, start revolutions, and become religious martyrs. Shut up about where that trail goes before a park ranger notices. I'm going to wait until they put a guard rail on that cliff."

commodity housing and autism

2008-07-06T16:28:26Z

I've always despised commodity housing for its (lack of) aesthetics. My first awareness of this, was noticing that in the middle of a sunny day, I had to turn a light on to see what I was doing.

Since then, I've heard the virtues sung, of a mobile labor force. Which needs fluid housing to stay mobile. Commodity housing for commodity labor.

But what's eating me right now, is all the little attention-sucks that I notice could be patched with better architecture. If I could design a house specifically with a teenage toddler in mind, life with the kid would be *much* less demanding. But any changes I make to this rented house, we walk away from next move.

Of course, the autism rate has skyrocketed in the past decade. Used to be, one kid in 3,000 was diagnosed, now it's more like 1 in 150.

So if builders decide to make houses for families struck by autism, there's a ready market for them. Yeesh!

Happy Sanctioned Explosives day

2008-07-05T02:22:23Z

I saw a woman at the store today, buying an American flag mylar balloon. It doesn't need wind to stay up, it just looks fat and bloated, like the landfill this flag will end up in.

Anyway, I found a better link to the Penn and Teller piece I referenced earlier.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NymRecFWgAs

...which doesn't even begin to touch the ambivalence I have about today, this year. Call it symbolism overload.

playground politics

2008-07-02T16:44:54Z

I think I've finally put my finger on what's so disturbing about about Boingboing's version of a slashthrough controversy.

They're being criticized for ignoring journalistic traditions of transparency, or resisting self-censorship. But there's another journalistic tradition that's being upheld here, having to do with libel. If there was a falling out between violet blue and the BB staff, it might or might not be in BB's best interest to air the reasons with her, but if they air these reasons with their readership, it makes things much, much worse.

The way I see it, they are trying to behave decently toward someone they don't like, and they're surrounded by a bunch of spectacle hungry kids, chanting, "Fight! Fight! Fight!". It's like lord of the flies over there.

Come to think of it, this is the sort of thing that agencies like Fox embody, when they bother to try to justify their policies. "Giving the viewers what they want". Almost a kind of 'democracy of attention'. And the question that doesn't get asked, is if they're serving the best aspects of their audience.

And the light bulb comes on!

Last weekend I walked out of the Circus Contraption show after the intermission. I was braced for dark humor, and heavy sarcasm, but the joke that offended me too much to stay, it was just too mean-spirited for my taste.

When Penn and Teller do a theatrical flag burning on the West Wing, they make similar dark humor... but it's high concept, they're also engaging the highest and best part of the audience at the same time they're poking our darkest fears. And it *works*. It's funny.

Of course, they don't *really* burn the flag on camera... or do they? And in the same way, Circus contraption isn't *really* burning any flags on stage. but they're inviting the audience in to that kind of dark spectacle, without holding up any lights, the way Penn and Teller did in that one gag.

And of *course* I get it, that we need to be free to tell bad jokes. We also need to be free to speak when the joke's not funny.

It was the comment that another blogger made about the BoingBoing controversy that cemented these two train wrecks in my mind: "monkeys flinging poo". At the blog, it's the audience flinging poo at the performers. At the Circus Contraption show, it was the performers flinging poo at the audience.

I begin to see the mechanics of how it's so hard any more to talk about an american dream.

WALL-E

2008-06-30T14:57:41Z

I can't begin to try to review this movie yet, there's so much of it still trying to sink in.

Suffice it to say, I had high hopes for a Pixar movie, but I wasn't expecting anything so deeply satisfying.

Now I'm worried that no one's going to want to talk about the meaning of the film. Start with the the choice of name for the ship

Anything more would be spoilery, so I'll just contain my enthusiasm for a while yet.

Re: Health Care

2008-06-25T13:50:51Z

The last time I had real health insurance was 13 years ago. I had forgotten what it was like. (plus, back then, I was still young enough to think myself invincible.)

It's such a subtle and profound shift in social status! Going to a public health clinic, there's a 6 week lead time on any appointment, and a virtual guarantee that I'll be treated like a child who can't make choices for myself.

One tiny little blue card, and suddenly I can get a next day appointment for stuff- often as not! I'm talking to professionals who'll trust me to take responsibility for my lifestyle.

And it's a bit easier to think proactive thoughts, when I've got some kind of safety net under me! Before, it's been like walking a tightrope without a net.

With so many other things going for it, America sure does suck when it comes to public health.

The Happening

2008-06-22T20:33:14Z

The buzz around this movie mostly seems to be that it sucked. I disagree, but I don't want to try to do it without spoilers.

Just before I went to see this, I was talking about Stephen King's Cell with somebody. Sure, that book was not as good as The Stand, but it wasn't trying to be. And the sub-plot about what's going on in the minds of those affected, it's really interesting.

I basically saw The Happening in terms of Cell. If this were a disease film, it would be about a crud with 100% mortality and 100% communicability. Everyone exposed catches it, and everyone who catches it dies.

This is kind of frustrating, because it means the storyteller isn't going to use one immune person to leverage an explanation. It's *not* a disease movie, it's more an ink-blot test.

So I've got my own pet theory about what's killing people in the film. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the total perspective vortex would shatter your soul by showing you exactly where you were in the big scheme of things. There is no hiding behind ignorance when you're in that gizmo. When you come out, you will know. Lucky for Zaphod, it's a huge, expensive piece of equipment that fills an entire building, and he only gets to go into a simulation of the real thing.

What if that effect were everywhere, though? Once exposed, you couldn't escape it. Spider Robinson's Telempath is a similar kind of end of the world story, the people lose their shit because they have too much information about their world.

Shyamalan's movie isn't even science fictiony enough to bring in rubber science. The math whiz is just as vulnerable to its effects as everyone else. (Too bad he wasn't a topologist, though! He might have lasted long enough to say something interesting!) So I'll just be poetic, and imagine an airborne fungal spore that stimulates racial memory directly. These people aren't having their brains scrambled, they simply know too much, too quickly. They have no context for what they suddenly know, and being addicted to stories, they end their own story as efficiently as possible. Larry Niven visits this idea in A World Out of Time, he calls it a 'soul whip'. (no, that's not a frothy cold drink, but it should be!)

When I first read that story, I was a teenager, and I thought to myself I could easily survive a soul whip attack, no problem. I've since had a chance to reconsider that idea.

What makes The Happening an interesting movie to me, is not so much what is killing everyone, but rather, imagining what it would look like to be able to catch that bug and not be destroyed. It really doesn't seem so farfetched for me to imagine a culture so advanced that they all catch this whiff in the air and are moved to all hug each other, like a huge MDMA trip. If these people's minds had enough context to put this new information, they would be somewhat less confused, and maybe even like themselves better. Those who didn't like themselves better would know exactly what lay ahead of them in order to earn redemption.

If all the drugs we're taking for depression are comparable to all the antibiotics we're giving livestock to let them survive the trip to the slaughterhouse, then that makes the american suburban experience a big feed lot, as in The Matrix. The way I read it, The Happening is about an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease among these cattle.

And if you do decide to see this film, catch it when you're feeling strong to begin with. Unlike I am Legend, there's no escapist fantasy element here, no silver linings inside these clouds

ghost mapping

2008-06-19T19:22:59Z

I keep bumping into Steven Johnson media: Once at TED, and then again at Long Now.

It's a really interesting story, and clearly there's implications for today. 1854 London had a problem of people dying, and the specific malady was called cholera. But the how and why of cholera was poorly understood. In the midst of the confusion, the government passed a law requiring everybody to do something that turned out to be exactly the wrong thing, and the problem got much worse before a more appropriate response could be made.

That really resonates with me these days. I'm not convinced that terrorism is as big a problem as the government wants me to believe, and I think the laws it's passing is making a problem worse instead of better. (The problem that's being made worse isn't properly called terrorism, but I'll leave that for the historians to figure out.)

Then I was watching a documentary about the country's food supply, and when they talked about the problems caused by routine mass medication with antibiotics (to counter problems caused by stress and overcrowding) I made a connection between that and the rise of big pharma for humans.

Mostly I'm thinking about the industrial practice of medicating humans for depression. I'm getting a lot of confusing numbers: 190 million prescriptions for antidepressants in a year (that's not as many people, lots of folks take more than one.) and 44% of all Americans take prescription drugs. (there's more heart disease medication sold than antidepressants)

So I don't have a clear concise graphic to show the epicenter of this chemical violence. I remember my own moments in therapy; whenever I'd talk about how upset I was getting from external events, the shrink would remind me that the session was all about *me*, never mind the rest of the world. Focus on my own individual problems and their resolution, take on the world later, when I feel stronger. Which is what I assume is being told to everyone else in therapy.

What might it look like if drugs were taken off the table, just long enough to look at other things?

I keep going back to this talk by James Kunstler, who looks at the architecture of depression. I love the idea that we might become less depressed as a nation if we didn't live in big box squalor.

Unlike 1854 London, we aren't being faced by one single overriding problem, though people who wait long enough will eventually be confronted by a single problem they can no longer ignore.

I can think of one single bottleneck through which any solutions are supposed to go: no matter what the issue, there's a requirement for someone somewhere to make money from its solution. Any other way just isn't "American" enough to be considered.

Sometimes it really IS that simple

2008-06-11T20:12:36Z

For the last few months, I have kept going back to a core question:

How did I get into this much trouble?

It's been a useful idea, since it spawns so many other questions. (How much trouble? Why trouble? Who am I in trouble with? What trouble am I in? From where does the trouble come?)

In fact, I never really expected any sort of answer to emerge, it was just kind of a mantra like, "Have you ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?"

But just now an answer *did* pop into my forebrain.

I got into this much trouble by standing up to a bully.

Everything else just sort of follows behind that understanding. I can feel many agendas popping into place.

Numb/not Dallas

2008-06-10T18:04:34Z

So, I'm looking over the articles of impeachment here

http://chun.afterdowningstreet.org/amomentoftruth.pdf

And my first visceral response is similar to what I felt at 9/11. My brain doesn't know what to do with this information.

I can sort-of understand how it is the news services can tell themselves that this isn't a story worth covering- it's too truthful to make it into the public sphere.

(Well, and if it did emerge into speakable space, then y'know, it might actually be acted upon.)

If I was heading up a kleptocracy, it makes sense that I wouldn't want to just fudge things a little bit, I'd want to be so outrageous that it's embarrassing to even bring this stuff up.

Despite all the knowing cynicism, I'm glad the political system still has room for someone like Kucinich to speak the truth publicly.

And while "President Kucinich" may well never come to pass, I might hope that he could get a cabinet position in an Obama administration.

One thing I'm still confused by, is how the timing works to prosecute an outgoing president. Clearly, presidents aren't immune from prosecution for things they did while in office, otherwise Nixon wouldn't have needed a pardon from Ford. What are the chances that Obama would pardon G.W or Cheney?

Yeah, I know, even though McCain can't campaign himself out of a wet paper bag, there's still this dark, uneasy expectation that someone somewhere is going to lynch this uppity negro. But I've got a pretty strong hunch that the window for that possibility is actually closing. If there's a poison pill in the works, it's not going to be that one.

If you look back at the heyday of political assassination, that season that saw two Kennedys and a King getting whacked, as well as many others... This all had a backdrop of rioting in the streets, grass roots violence. I remember reading that over 200 instances of urban rioting hit the news in that season, and Vietnam wasn't yet a shorthand for pointless unwinnable war.

These days, violent crime has been on the decline for a while, and the violence on the everyone's radar screen is not lone gunman malcontent, but focused acts of organized terrorism, exactly the sort of thing an assassination attempt represents.

The reason I don't think we're going to see another president murdered in office, is because the people who might want that (and might be in a position to make it happen) are in decline, their power is eroding. I'd be far more concerned if Article 28 of the impeachment *hadn't* made the news, if they'd been successful at stacking the deck in their favor.

As a political tool, assassination carries with it an enormous footprint, and I don't think the black hats have got that much ground to stand on anymore.

On the brighter side, Kucinich having read this into the record makes these things more actionable later on, I think. The karmic debt has got to be paid in some way, and if the other nations of the world aren't going to band together against this bully, or if the seething mob isn't going to 'storm the bastille' and exact rough justice, then the system of justice that we've got in place already will have to do what it's designed to do, in its own time. The black hats have got exactly that long to make their play, and I believe their options are narrowing.

[Edit: for the benefit of any secret service software that might think I've used forbidden language, it should be obvious from context that I do not advocate violence against heads of state. If you want to sniff me out to make sure I'm not a threat, then I worry that you're allocating resources in the wrong places. Go investigate Huckabee or Clinton, for that matter!]

Idea, not a belief

2008-06-09T16:56:48Z

Some years ago, I noticed a bias in my own thinking, a strong preference to pay attention to some things and not others. Like a slippery slope gravity well, the closer to the center of this tendancy I get, the stronger the pull is. Around the edges, not so much. And in the other directions, there's an active repulsion.

I started calling this bias, "The Deep Dream". It speaks to what I want most to happen for myself and everyone else. But I don't think it's ever going to be a manifesto, or a shopping list, or even something as concrete as an agenda. (let's face it, survival is an agenda, this dream of mine is mostly just a wish to survive in style.)

The other day I realized, this deep dream is really only an aesthetic.

This is good news if I don't want to constantly be defending it and myself, who can argue their sense of beauty? You like chocolate, I like strawberry, what's to discuss?

But I can't help but notice that some aesthetics are more compatible than others.

If I'm ever to have my deep dream come true, it's going to mean that other people's dreams are shattered. I can be OK with that, eventually.

Gaming Stuff

2008-06-07T18:23:49Z

So now I've gotten deep into a couple of Ratchet and Clank games on the PS3, installed and played the first Half-Life on the PC, and now I'm playing HALO CE on the Xbox.

I'm beginning to see how World of Warcraft might suck people's brains out.

It's always interesting, though, to notice the little glitches that remind me that the graphics engine is not the same as the physics engine. "real life" doesn't have that type of defect, but it *does* happen often enough that I'm reminded that I don't live in the same world as most everyone around me.

With HALO; goodness gracious, that is entertainingly written. I could care less about my monster blasting prowess, I like to play on the easiest level, and if I could easily cheat and be invulnerable, I would. What a fun story! And now I'm stuck having spent over an hour trying to make one jump across a stupid gap. It's clearly what I'm spos'ed to do, but the room is built so I have to master the art of jumping farther than usual to solve that puzzle. I might walk away from it, I'm so annoyed. And there are other games to play. But yesterday morning I woke up from a dream about the Flood, and it calls to me...

I saw S2 again last night with P. (tonight's the last night, if you want to go and haven't.)

The first time I saw it, I came away feeling satisfied, but the second time, I was more pissed off. Maybe pissed off and satisfied in the same measure. I came away from it wanting to see another play, (that may not exist yet) about the human condition of being an owned thing. If no one is allowed to hold title on me, but everything I touch is owned by someone else, am I still free? S2 touches on a few of these issues, but the main character is entangled in so many struggles, the ownership issue hardly comes up.

If there were a way to combine the energy and humanity of live theater, with the epic vision of a 3D texture mapped video game, I would be all over that. It's the sort of thing Entros would have been good for, if it still existed.