- The global climate mobilization must start today with the governments that exist now, the activists who are alive now and the distribution of wealth and power as it is.
- And, for myself, it's good to write carefully - to draw you in with great care and to not act this way. On the other hand, it's hard for me to possibly know what to do with any of these pages! There are recipe and howto articles. There are anecdotes, punchline type things. You can easily add your two cents to a thought that's propagating around. But I don't know - I've never lived in a large city, and rarely even been to a really massive city, and I find myself looking at the buildings, just the sound of the air is so strange to me, the feeling of being on a street that is so worn and has fragments of millions of boots and beards and bits of sandwiches. I can see that it is an inverted rock tumbler, where the street is being tumbled by all of the things colliding against it. It is erosion of an industrial strength. But that wouldn't be interesting to someone in a city, would it?
- The basic format seems pretty stable. I'm working on a lot of different but related projects, such as a library and computer-generated aquarium.
- Once the museum is complete, it could become a private sanctuary for contemplation, since the museum will be like being inside your own subconscious mind.
- It's strange to think that personal reputation is becoming simultaneously more and less valuable today. Reputation is the currency that powers our social systems - a symbol of your unique value - but at the same time, it's easier than ever to find substitutes for a particular sound, style, aesthetic, or way of thinking.
- For the truly obsessed person, the need for validation isn't about ego; it’s about sanity. You want to know there’s some meaning behind the dizzying mental labyrinth that you simultaneously can't escape and also never want to leave.
- The strong emphasis on the sign of Capricorn continues to characterize the quality of time in February.
- I see the digital disruption of our cultural life as an opportunity to rethink the analog/digital divide and re-examine what we've discarded - not in order to clean it up and put it back to use exactly how it was, but to understand what was thrown away that we still need.
- It may be that in the 21st century, the strategy of strengthening a society's education needs to be channelled not through universities but through thematic libraries for people of all ages.
- To confuse a world hash with an aesthetic is like saying Sherlocks Holmes' ability to read the clues in his clients' appearances made him a fashion critic rather than a detective.
- I have found a new evil twin, my first new one in a decade.
- The past always leaves its marks on the present, but the future is a place where those black marks can be diminished.
- My hope is that others will be able to find ways to express themselves creatively without worrying about having traditional art skills, or whether what they do fits into some established pattern.
- To the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self.
- The exhibitions and books on the subject don't totally represent your childhood favourites, of course not, but it at least feels like you were there now, rather than looking in on the games that you couldn't, didn’t want to, or were told you shouldn't play. You hope everyone gets a little bit of this happy recognition now, rather than it being wholly reserved for a very specific subset of fanboy.
- The idea of what can be won is vital to winning it.
- A community that is oriented towards organizational rigor is not a utopia. It isn't even somewhere I want to live
- The version of queer social relations that this book attempts to envision is critical of the communitarian as an absolute value and of its negation as an alternative all-encompassing value.
- Following Muñoz's, these games would archive past memories and events through a utopian speculative lens; focusing on social and creative relations. Experiences like these would provide me a respite from the pragmatism that overwhelmingly guides my thoughts and actions and could hopefully lend some sort of guidance on how and where to live in the future.
- By 2017, the digital decay had become an established part of the internet tradition.
- I guess IndieWeb is still for devoted hobbyists rather than, you know, just people.
- It was a sort of proto-web, where curation and navigation were basically the same thing.
- This can devolve into a kind of "noticing joust" in which the reviewer one-ups the author by noticing just how well they noticed something. Intolerable.
- Here's what I want to say: every way of writing can work, and every reason for writing can work.
- Yep. Little stories are the internet’s native and ideal art form.
- Hey, maybe that's the answer. Maybe we need to take the h out of href. Maybe we need to take the hyper out of hyperlink. If someone really cares, they'll have to manually type the words into their search engine. That'll stop those link cowboys!
- I’m still a creative—a photographer—but my biggest problem is imposter syndrome. I think I take myself far too seriously today. When I was building my GeoCities page, my approach was more tongue-in-cheek, with a self-deprecating sense of humor.
- My goal isn't for this to be a "nostalgia site" though, but more take all these lost flavors and create something new with them. I believe the evolution of entertainment can be a forked road, and I want this world/subculture we've got brewing here to be an option for people who are sick of being told what to like or how to exist.
- There are enough pretty photos on the net. It might well be time for more of my personality to show through in my work. Life is short. It should have meaning, but it should also be fun.
- Participants will be tasked with examining a particular collection of the archive, to find answers to an open question. There will be some hours to research and document the findings; and to immerse in the material, resurfacing with more questions. The goal is to resist distant reading, abstraction, and algorithmic excavation; to rely instead on human time and memory, interpretation and serendipity.
- "I found myself wishing something bad would happen... a humiliation, like the one I feel always," I had written. "There has to be a price for getting everything you want. For never being embarrassed."
- And yet I am starting to feel like life is not for having experiences so that therefore one can make deductions about life and one's personality and then make up rules for the future by which one can live and therefore attain happiness and perfection.
- But Paulie's openness and understanding also keep him out of the state of spiritual death that Tony exists in, even if he doesn't quite grasp what it is that's happening to him. He tries to open up to Tony about the vision of the Virgin Mary he had several episodes ago, but he's incapable of keeping Tony from busting his balls about it. In one way, Paulie survives because he's a cockroach; in another, he survives because he's open to the messiness of life and its myriad possibilities.
- The interaction of physical and digital space - my beat, if I'm forced to summarize it - hasn't been fundamentally transformed so much as intensified
- Don't worry, my allegiance ultimately lies with the New Sincerity and with reducing cynicism
- I'm still learning how to get around the 2019 web tho. Might be a matter of finding good shit and then working backwards.
- All things are memes, all things are serious. I mock that which I care about, sometimes, because that's how I know I can really care.
- Enter the world of Normality - how long can you stay sane? What IS sane, when the world is mad? Is madness supposed to be an excuse for those things you did?
- We're one month into a worldwide experiment to learn whether the internet alone can produce sufficient meaning on its own, or whether we must keep mining our memories of an embodied shared reality to bridge this gap.
- "Miyazaki Patchwork" and the background image refer to the works of Hayao Miyazaki, famous for films that in aggregate suggest a kind of man/environment synthesis with traditional-spiritual concepts... a kind of "peaceful ruins" world with scattered agrarian societies that have access to pieces of futuristic technology but don't live in systems defined by them
- Because the television apparatus offers its spectator a Heraclitean flow across multiple channels, its very abundance may diminish any given act of attention
- Video stores impressed upon me the importance of paratexts and material culture for understanding film culture and the vagaries of taste and value within it.
- Additionally, I've come to realize that the simple act of just sitting and looking, breathing, feeling the outdoors is better than most other things I could be doing.
- Sometimes I wonder why I put myself through all this, but movies ain't gonna watch themselves.
- It's impossible to collect information by collecting original sources. Everything runs through our brain's filter and is subject to our interpretation.
- Reading effectively means the text changes our knowledge permanently.
- Routines require simple, repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly. Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process can significant change take place (which is why none of the typical "10 mind-blowing tools to improve your productivity" tips you can find all over the internet will ever be of much help).
- The things you are supposed to find in your head by brainstorming usually don't have their origins in there.
- Truly nothing beats directories when it comes to discovery.
- I have a suspicion that people retreat into protocol work to escape from the human work that must be done... What if the Indieweb is not Webmentions? What if it is simply the work of reading and writing to each other?
- I see the wiki as a story-telling device that reuses older stories to reconstruct new ones
- What is particularly interesting about ergodic forms of textuality is the ways in which they seek to register the living human subject as inhabiting the realm of cybernetic culture in the more 'conventional' spaces of the novel or play.
- Fiction writers often adopted very elaborate gambits in order to disorient readers; if hypertext disorientation was an ever-present hazard, I asked, why was it so difficult to achieve?
- In Borges' short story everyone has defined themselves by the library, because they don’t know anything else. But the metaphor is relatable. Sheer joy at the idea that all the answers have been written down, following the realisation that the answers aren't the hard part, it's understanding the collection.
- There is infinite hope, only not for us.
- I knew how it was going to end when I started writing it. That the end would be mine and Dennis' death and nothing beyond that. People would wonder and ask themselves what was that? They would have to come back again to figure it out.
- This film is so bizarre that it somehow manages to be both appalling and redemptive.
- So that's what I did today. Made peanut brittle with Teddy Grahams. It was fun, it was an activity, and now I have a Tupperware stuffed with what would honestly qualify as shanks. My teeth hurt and I burned my favorite fingers, but this was a good day. I encourage you to make your own good days, whether it's by cooking peanut brittle or doing something that isn't that.
- Moving pictures can still do what they have been invented for one hundred years ago. They can still be moving.
- Everybody in the world is doing something without you.
- There are many evenings of mediocre Internet but one day last week, out of nowhere and rather suddenly, something changed.
- For more than a decade, Megan has dedicated herself to a key insight: throwaways are the pith of history.
- Honeymoons, after all, consist of fleeting, ephemeral moments whose significance deepens with time.
- There is so little you can do with a mouse and trackpad. It's a shame that the richness of today's screens seems to be accompanied by such a constrained toolbox for human-machine interaction.
- Have you ever read a novel and felt like the story was something you could keep?
- America is a very poor lens through which to view Las Vegas, while Las Vegas is a wonderful lens through which to view America. What is hidden elsewhere exists here in quotidian visibility.
- I'm such a scrap paper hound, a person for whom the crinkly and cheap paper of the world elicits a unique understanding and pleasure.
- I always felt fluttery with excitement when Bill Murray showed up in a movie, and this sensation has lasted, what, 30 years?
- "Tourist-style consumption" spreading beyond tourist destinations themselves to suffuse everyday life, thanks to globalization and hypermobility, with architecture responding by orienting itself toward experience consumption as well... the digitally mediated tourist gaze.
- My weblog is a collateral victim of Covid-19, which has become a great worldwide excuse to stop whatever you were doing.
- Yet even creative work which is abandoned and seen by no one is often useful exercise. One explores, one adventures by finding "new ground" that often just isn't worth it; it's arid and lunar ground, there's nothing to farm, but unless you venture beyond and explore, you will never know that.
- It's a good life, if you don't weaken!
- Some people will tell you that Adventure Games aren't really dead, they have just morphed into other forms, or that other genres have absorbed Adventure Games. If this is true, they've done a pretty bad job of it.
- It's a monthly diary of this magical year...
- On a wiki, mistakes are reversible.
- Your old college papers that were so interesting to write but are lost in a file cabinet somewhere... We're interested!
- We seek to demonstrate and reinforce the simple observation that History is a Creative Act in the Present! By this we mean that the meaning and understanding of the past is always an intellectual and social process carried out in our own time. We think it vital to invite as many people as possible into the process of literally making history.
- Welcome to the SECOND version of my home web site, a internet truck stop of pretty much all that I'm doing; future, currently and in the past. Yup, it is going to be THAT confusing. Click on something and let the fun begin (providing if having you life sucked dry by the internet is your cup o' tea)
- Everything that is transformed into the past and rendered tangible as such will be saved from the void.
- In a world where music can be crass deception (Creed) or aesthetic hyperinflation (U2), you turn to lo-fi in the same way you take to a walk around the block: it's comforting, memorable, and there's nothing phony about it.
- Like my late grandmother, I have it in my blood to disappear into the hush of night by train. Despite my many qualms and silent complaints with the internet, I have met several kindred spirits through this strange shadowy land and travelled into worlds far different from my own through such brief encounters composed of pixelated space and time. As silly as it sounds, when I share things online, I want my heart to be in the right place.
- I watch a lot of films. The cinema has become for me a part of my experience. I cite cinema as if the films I have seen were part of my life and of my experience.
- The idea of a message as something sent by a speaker to a receiver in order to elicit a response from that receiver no longer holds. Messages are now contributions to circulating content. There's a shift from the primacy of a message's use value to the primacy of its exchange value, to its capacity to circulate, to be forwarded and to be counted.
- I am convinced that vegetables are the most photogenic of all inanimate objects. Film soaks up all of those radish reds, kale greens, and zinnia golds in such a way that my heart climbs up to my throat just to peer out and see.
- I don't know where or when, just that it happened. I have tried all day to recapture the feeling. There was a scent of trees.
- Despite the (unfortunate) dead ends of these moments, I think they capture exactly what I like about going to the pictures. A familiarity to something I can't quite reach.
- Sometimes I feel I remember Jonathan's life better than my own.
- This separates the cinephile from the lover of novels or classical music. They love their art, I suspect, because of its great accomplishments. Who with literary or musical taste would embrace the subpar novel or the apprentice toccata? But cinephiles will watch damn near anything looking for a moment's worth of magic. Perhaps this puts cinephiles closer to theatre buffs. They too wait hopefully for the sublime instant that flickers out of amateur performances of Our Town and Man and Superman.
- This whole year has been spent in filmy uncertainty. I'd like to know things truly and speak simply for once.
- All of these archival materials are presented as actively found by the filmmaker/narrator, not as simply given. In fact, the film is very much about the personal process through which these further fragments were discovered and about their promise of a coherence that ultimately cannot be realized.
- Third cinema is, in our opinion, the cinema that recognizes in that struggle the most gigantic cultural, scientific, and artistic manifestation of our time, the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point - in a word, the decolonization of culture.
- Those of us from the Third World have to reject the ideas of film narration based on the 19th century bourgeois novel with its commitment to harmony. Our societies have been too lacerated and fractured by colonial powers to fit into those neat scenarios.
- We don't understand a culture when we're in the thick of it. Only when we're made to see the waste, or the leftovers of a particular culture, do we get an intuition of what culture is about.
- Objects and settings are generalized, rarely pinned to a specific time and place: we encounter a house with a garden, a wooden cross, a pastor, incestuous twins, crystal glasses, a gauzy blue dress.
- There is no progress, only a return to a conviction that should never have been shed. The brother, who seems to be narrating the story after his suicide, falls back on what he always suspected: "The importance of succeeding in life is a noose. It's nothing but a noose."
- Jaeggy's shipwrecked alter egos have little use for self-understanding, wholesome productivity, and virtuous happiness. They see no point to sucking the marrow from life, because for Jaeggy there is no marrow. "What does she care about what is inside?" one of her characters asks. "Inside where?"
- I visit libraries for reasons that might be similar to why some people go to museums: to be inspired, to be surprised, to see something I haven't seen before, to visit favorite sections of the building or collection, and to hopefully find something that I was unaware of that might expand my understanding of the world or human creativity.
- I'm always trying to consider the line between the poetic or playful aspects of my selections and juxtapositions, and the informational aspects of the source material. I like the way the title Rudder looks next to Vacuum magazine. Each magazine has a repeated pair of letters, and the same number of letters and they just look right on facing pages. I don't think knowing that Rudder is a magazine about antique boats, and Vacuum is a magazine about atmospheric pressure diminishes that pleasure.
- You're trying to tell a "true story," knowing all the while that this is inherently oxymoronic, and that you have imposed a narrative upon a mass of facts.
- What ate so much time in particular was reading the comments, the reactions, the unfolding of new evidence and discoveries.
- The trash bravado of Corey Feldman is what I need because it's sincere though acted. Because on a sunlight drenched Tuesday where the nightmare of time and achievement and ageing and my face and what did I say I'm pathetic - I see this mythical slow downing here. The myth of community and an idea of time that isn't so combustible-flammable-dissipating-dissipating. In VHS time. TV time. In the moment. Flipping channels. A moment sitting on the bed, up at night, breakfast in the morning, time enough for a conversation, not so alone. A community (never one we had in real life). Walking down the street.
- Too old to hesh, too poor to own a house, too queer to look normal, too anxious to have their confidence, too much of the void vibrating into suicidal ideation. Then, (try) melting it into present time/mindfulness time: there's something in cinephilia (Joe Dante's with us here satanic rituals and The Exorcist and Leatherface on TV). Trashbabe devotions to forgotten things. This devotion to the spirit of them. Over and over, this endless stretching, like being thinner than thread into the sky forever. The ritual of movies reclaim time and being, because it makes my soul vibrate in time to the moment - I see some essential part of my being in the essence of it. A dream of being which I am compelled to excavate.
- Humans' most fragile capacity is to admit reality, and there are three radical ways to refuse reality, which are madness, suicide, and blindness. But not everyone is that radical, and the only other way out is to delude oneself. Cinema, as a language and as an entertainment form, fits there perfectly. There is nothing more illusory than cinema.
- Some people wonder/ask: "Why make your own site by hand?" There's no easy answer for that, but the people at Baldora Station cover it pretty well in their about section. I think Cal Newport's thoughts on social media also give a lot of insight as to why you should try to get off conventional social media and make your own stuff. If I had to give my own answer though, I'd say something like: What's the fun in owning a mansion at the top of a hill overlooking a cemetery if you don't have any trap doors or hidden staircases in it?
- The Internet is an interactive medium, built on hypertext, curiosity, information density, and amazing tangents.
- When the man was merely gifted but not particularly rewarded, I was comfortable; we were in it together, comrades in a world that didn't care what we had to tell it. But now, what did his success prove, if not that when the gift is prodigious enough, the world does need us, it will pay?
- Never let a few strange years in your life define you. You are more than that. You have more of yourself to explore.
- Live the life you have imagined.
- The ghost ships that didn't carry us.
- The future is just a kind of history that hasn't happened yet.
- As natural as remembering, is forgetting.
- The crusade of two men to achieve their glory, which happens to be a few bread crumbles to make it through another day, a fair maiden to call their own and the favor of the saints that shall save their immortal soul.
- I don't think we talk enough about physical media and how it brings joy even in our darkest moments
- There was never going to be a reckoning. No accountability, only retreat.
- Physical proximity does not eliminate social distancing, nor facilitates non-functional human relationships.
- Now, it's more subtle: since it doesn't kill you, it drives you crazy.
- This never happens when my attention is captured by something that is not on a screen, in part because there is no system in place for measuring it... When I am trapped by the screen, my attention takes material form, it matters, it circulates, it counts; when I look away, it seems less like 'attention' and more like an unmediated flow of 'real' experience
- As soon as I've painted some nonsense in a day I start to feel like I'm a real person and I did something. After that I can eat noodles and browse Amazon for hair clips with skulls on them for 45 minutes.
- As long as you're out of your house, you feel like you're doing something.
- Themed fun houses called "museums"
- So rarely does our present seem like a future the past would have wanted, this embarrassment of a world
- Internet's dead again.
- A shortened time horizon means that any week can be billions of minutes, so long as you have a medium of eyeballs to channel those minutes (humans are the medium, time is the message).
- Whining since birth, writing about it since last week
- I first blundered across the thing as a teenager, stumbling blind around the late-night TV schedules.
- This Art Deco-styled Mardi Gras
- As a kid, for whatever reasons I couldn’t fathom, I sensed I was missing out on something and I didn’t know what it was but, damn it, it was there, taunting me. The first clue of this teasing was seeing the old Pacific Ocean Park pleasure pier on the way to Venice Beach.
- I don't want to look cute or beautiful. I don't want to look like a guy or like a feminine barbie-doll. I don't want to look like a punk rocker or a poet or a painter. I want to look like a human being who happens to be female. I don't want to spend any more time fussing with my appearance than you do. I want to look like myself.
- The blind are leading the blind, scholars using archives without realising the heavy layers of intervention and meaning coded into the records by their creators and by archivists long before any box is opened in the research room, and archivists treating their archives without much sensitivity to the large footprints they are themselves leaving on the archival record
- Information science is the science of propagation of meaningful human messages
- And it forces you to learn new words, to think new thoughts, to keep going.
- They can find the stories they need to, and they bring themselves to stories.
- I do not believe that any of these methods can do the job, alone or in combination. I think the goal is to teach students to read texts, to understand them, and to be able to provide a relevant criticism of them. That is the end goal, and that should be sufficient. All the methods are 'just' steps on our way in learning how to read, understand, and criticize texts. But as such they may represent valuable or indeed necessary steps that counteract the use of narrow and one-sided approaches. To read a text is often not a simple process. It involves considering a text in relation to other texts, in relation to the methods used and the social interests it serves and counteracts, and in relation to its public reception as indicated by, for example, bibliometric measures. In other words, it involves the subjectivity of the reader, and that subjectivity is influenced – more or less – by different theoretical perspectives. Good, scholarly reading is to be aware of different perspectives, and to situate oneself among them.
- I'm not entirely sure how accurate can a review post be, versus being a snapshot of how one feels at the very end of the year.
apr 17 2020 ∞
dec 31 2020 +