There’s a part of me that cares about the future plight of the world.
Then there’s a part of me that just wants a goddamn game console that works without requiring a blood sacrifice.
Also, I love technology, not as much as you, you see, but I still love technology, always and forever. Except when I have to ponder modulating my bioelectric field to keep a G1 from shutting down after loading a web page. Maybe that’s called karma, and if so, well, karma can bite it.
Stay tuned to this space for the same reason you might look for patterns in static on the tube. However that works for you, you know?
In Uncategorized on
21 November 2008 with no comments
This interminable restlessness, this subjugation of will to a game of chicken, extends into abject failure. The game no longer achieves honor, no longer demonstrates an untemperable spirit. Rather, the player plays its role conspicuously as a masked coward, so obviously pained to bear out a strength it can’t muster, though the audience hushes.
Honor, strength of will, is borne by temporal mastery, by an execution of duty no matter the maelstrom of detraction and insurgency. The proletariat-by-choice, and not the unbridled madman, will achieve, will reach and find purchase.
Another unnecessarily late night, as seen through burning eyes, replete with reflexive criticism, or guilt, and a more granular realization of how much is left to learn toward any measure of maturity. The cycle is vicious, is both tenuously trivial and deeply affecting, a swarm of potential failures greeting any opportunity, which only feeds the urge to withdraw, which only frenzies the swarm, etc., ad nauseum.
In Aldous, Muse on
31 October 2008 with 1 comment
And We Need It To Stay Out There
Seen monsters aren’t monsters. They’re neighbors, however temporary. Monsters are guerilla, unseen, opportunistic. They stay shrouded in potential. Where Lorentz had it for relativistic contraction based on inertial frames, these things enjoy a distortion wrought from awareness frames.
This is why we still delight in dirty jokes; we all know their subtext, and can often predict their punchlines. We need these contexts, these distorting frames of awareness, to make sense of the world. We know we’re not ever going to achieve parity of understanding and reality; our hypotheses will always need refinement. We accept that all our knowledge is approximation, and need it to be so.
This is why porn and prostitution and lying and theft remain fixtures in our cultures. It’s no accident that congregations of people will invariably sort themselves into a pecking order. Perfection, like power, carries obligatory responsibility, and most people prefer to outsource their authority to people more interested in wielding it. Whatever impedes perfection—like crime—protects us from the great responsibility that comes with great power.
In Uncategorized on
17 October 2008 with no comments
I’m rather depressed these days. It’s been years since anything I’ve done has turned out successfully — with a few rare exceptions — and I’m falling into the thing which afflicted you a couple of years ago — a failure of the will, shall we say. My ambitions seem far beyond my talents, and light-years beyond the vicissitudes of my character, and I think of this enormous novel I’m now starting, which could well take ten years, and if done properly, it must be unpublishable except in green-backed French “dirty” editions, and I’ll be middle-aged when it’s done, and somehow I just don’t believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn’t even seem terribly important. I’m beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated — people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable — after all, I say to myself, I haven’t done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them.
Norman Mailer (via kottke)
I’ll avoid the obvious bemoaning by asking your take on this thing we call “depression.” I question why we’ve firmly fixed “depression” among the constellations of malady. I’m a little torn between two angles:
- Is the great taxonomic engine that is science staking out real afflictions of the mind, helping people understand they don’t suffer alone, that there may be ways to mitigate their pain?
- Alternately, is “depression” shorthand for “I see it, now: this whole enterprise of living is absurd, so I can’t bring myself to care about it”?
As much as I might believe anything, I believe my “mind” is an emergent property of a messy tangle of neurons and its interactions with the rest of my body and environment. No fault in thinking that fixing a mind might start with adjusting its environment, via psychotropics or diet or exercise, etc. However, that presupposes that a particular mindset or behavior is aberrant, that its generative mind is ailing. If in fact a particular conclusion defies widely held ideas, and we diagnose its resultant stress as “disease,” we do so by fiat. None of us knows, none of us subscribes to the Universe’s secret newsletter, You: The Unabridged Story of What You Need and How to Get It.
To put it another way is to resort to cliché: What if the mad are running the asylum; and how can we even know?
In Aldous, Muse on
15 October 2008 with no comments
- Home ownership is “most stable financial investment”
- → everyone wants to buy a home, independent of his debt/income ratio
- → opportunistic (Capitalistic) lenders create loan packages so anyone, independent of his debt/income ratio, can buy a home
- → increased default rate affects solubility of large players in commercial paper markets
- → Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and other financial institutions falter, and others such as Wachovia and Washington Mutual essentially bought out of ruin
- → U.S. stock market down over 30% in past year, world economy struggling
There’s another shoe upon the wind. I feel it in my neck.
In Aldous, Technology on
9 October 2008 with no comments
This Is Not Your Father’s Mishap
I’ve been watching debates and speeches and soundbites and videobites and reality bites. I’ve kept my ear to the grindstone, my eyes on the prize. I’m confused.
Any system as large as the U.S. economy, let alone an international economy, cannot be encapsulated in a two-hour series of rhetorical jabs. In the entirety of the coverage of Barack Obama’s and John McCain’s plans, there have been a choice few moments approaching clarity on the topic, and too few to know what either plan might hope to achieve. It should go without saying, moreover, that this is only the political extremity of a much larger monster, a body of discourse that excels in vapidity.
Leave it to public radio, and the program of one Ira Glass, to shed some real light on the difficulty of the issue, and some of the nuance. In episode #365 of This American Life, Glass et al bring the pain. You can’t avoid it, so you might as well look straight on as an arm and leg are not-so-cleanly cleaved from your weakening body.
In Aldous on
9 October 2008 with no comments
Harkening
Once upon a time, the TV season started in the fall, ended in the spring, and then the summer was nothing but reruns. These days, there are an increasing number of “seasons” each year, and the summer is a playground of lackluster content that couldn’t measure up to the main lackluster content the “regular” season(s) could offer.
I say: “Enough!”
For the near-yet-indeterminate future, I’ll be playing nothing but old stuff. It’s nicely randomized, using Rob Marsh’s excellent Random Posts plugin. It took a little doing to get it to output exactly what I wanted, but, alas, isn’t this the point?
Now, in Gail Armstrong’s evocative words, I am off, perchance to pursue “endeavours of more delayed satisfaction, more careful crafting, more in line with where true passions lie.”
In Family, Technology on
17 September 2008 with no comments
In Aldous,Foolishness on September 28, 2007
In Foolishness,Muse,Venom on June 24, 2005
In Aldous on October 9, 2008