Truth Happens
Posted on 2007-05-06 at 15:02
Truth Happens: Get used to it.
These are a few of my favorite things
Posted on 2007-05-01 at 08:05
So, there are 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 things I like. I'll limit this point to 3:
- Linux
- Movies
- High Definition Video
Imus and the Case of the Black Women
Posted on 2007-04-10 at 07:42
There's all manner of uproar. He's been suspended, chastised, made to apologize, and even scolded by the (wants-to-be-)great Reverend Al Sharpton. Of course, everything done to him and said about him is 100% on the money. He should be ostracized by the community for making vile, mysogynistic comments disparaging the women of that team. That sort of attitude belongs in the 19th century where we had hoped to leave it behind us.
It's a shame all this outrage and disgust can't also be poured out on the rap community. So, let me get this straight? When Don Imus calls black women "nappy-headed hos" it's torch-and-pitchfork-worthy, but when the rapper Eazy-E "slapped the ho" and claimed to be a "woman-beater" as part of one of the most influential rap groups ever (N.W.A.) all we hear are the crickets chirping. Where's Al Sharpton? I guess it's bad when Imus speaks ill of black women because it makes it less special and fun when black men do it?
Al, clean up your own house before you start worrying about the mess in someone else's living room. How about from now on we get upset whenever anyone speaks that way to anyone else? Just a suggestion.
Buffy Season 8
Posted on 2007-03-21 at 08:09
So, BtVS has been off the air for a couple of years, but Joss Whedon (series mastermind) has brought it back for an "8th season" via the medium of comic books. I have issue #1. It's a great book---solid art, and wonderful writing---but it is a very different medium. The difference in medium is evident in the story and the "feel" of the work itself as distinct from the tv series it follows.
So it you are a fan, go yourself a favor is get a copy (if you can find one!). You will be pleased, but don't expect the same audience experience you had watching the show. It goes without saying that it may be as good, but it's quite changed.
What you want, what you need: fans and endings, and narrative satisfactions
Posted on 2007-03-20 at 08:41
I had the pleasure of reading this blog entry elsewhere that was ostensibly about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but far more about the nature of being a fan, of fiction, and of the needs of the reader. It's one of the few blog entries on the Internet worth reading. PEriodically, these come into my field of view and I feel bad about just how wastefully dumb my own blog is. Go. Read. Be Edified.
Oh, and to whet your appetite:
And there's the painful part: fans tend (here's the broad brush for you) to have a hard time making distinctions between what amplifies the story's dramatic impact or meaning, and what would satisfy them as fans. Get the difference? A fan isn't just a heavy reader: 'fan' is a social category. Wanting the story to continue isn't the same as wanting to know what happens next - one desire takes the text itself (the edifice, the mechanism) as its object, one takes the world of the narrative, the series of (unfortunate) fictional events. One frustrating feature of fan discourse is just this: a lot of the time fans fail to make this distinction.
"Make Up" or "Make Believe"
Posted on 2007-01-21 at 15:07
There too he sculptured a broad fallow field
Of soft rish mould, thrice ploughed, and over which
Walked many a ploughman, guiding to and fro
His steers, and when on their return they reached
The border of the field the master came
To meet them, placing in the hands of each
a goblet of rich wine. Then turned they back
Along the furrows, diligent to reach
Their distant end. All dark behind the plough
The ridges lay, a marvel to the sight.
Like the field in the quote above from Homer's Illiad, these women are made into an image of beauty. It is not the dirt in the field we find beautiful nor the woman under the makeup, but rather it is the beauty, even the dignity, that our culture bestows on them that makes them pleasing to us. Aesthetic beauty and moral beauty are not easily distinguished. Like the education of our children, we move purposefully from a natural to a cultural state. It's what we do. We transform nature. We make it in our self-image as we perceive it, and when it gets too hard to do on our own, we ask for help---from ploughmen, makeup artists, painters...and each other.
I was leaving the building for the day. A co-worker was leaving at the same time. When we saw each other standing up, we gave our daily good bye's, put on our coats and left our cubes. Hollywood would have the decency to fade to black at this point, but real life is not so interested in transforming nature. No, we'd said all that needed saying. We both got up and left. Problem is, we both went the same way. So now, we are walking to the parking lot together in an awkward silence. No script was prepared. No protocol readied us for the silent walk out. I said, "So it's not so easy to get rid of me, is it?" We laughed. The moment was rescued from reality and given a cultural context---hence a beauty. As a species, we don't like ugly.
So, what does it mean to say someone is a human? I suppose it depends on who you ask, but I would argue that we are not merely complex bipedal mammal. Being human is more than that. It's about stopping to enjoy a warm fire in a winter chill, it's about having a dream, seeking out the things that are pleasing. Being human is about enjoying the beauty that we, each of us, adds to the world in which we live. I could be crass about the Hollywood makeovers in the video above, but I think I'll just be grateful to the directors, the artists, designers, scriptwriters, and air-brushers who are trying to give us a little bit more beautiful world than the one in which we find ourselves. I don't see anything wrong with that.
The End of the Blockbuster Era?
Posted on 2006-09-30 at 00:17
Luis Villa, gnome-guy turned law student has a must-read blog entry about the changing role of media in our culture.
The short of it is that he went to see some very smart people talking. He took notes. Those notes are interesting. Lawrence Lessig (one of those guys talking) is a personal hero. He even got portrayed on the West Wing once. That's just how cool he is!
I wanna do a podcast
Posted on 2005-09-29 at 08:02
Between Will and I, we have the equipment to do it. I wanna.
Now Playing...
Posted on 2005-09-29 at 08:01
TWiT Podcast. Download. Listen. Enjoy.
Sticking it to The Man
Posted on 2005-08-16 at 08:01
Online advertisers are now complaining that when we delete browser cookies, we are taking food from their mouths. Though I understand that the ability to better manage browser cookies is disruptive to their current business model, I don't feel any particular moral imperative to help. Advertising is about lying. It's about making us feel less than complete, then offering us that which will make us whole again. Disrupting that sort of enterprise is, itself, a fulfilling endeavor. To that end, I present for linux users a simple script to remove unwanted browser cookies:
#! /bin/bash
cd ~/.mozilla/firefox/$profile/
echo "drop firefox cache and history"
shred -u Cache/* history.*
echo "grab all valid firefox cookies"
egrep '(slashdot|mapquest|mywebgrocer|news\.google|netflix)' <cookies.txt >cookiesnew.txt
echo "get rid of all cookies not explicitly kept above"
shred -u cookies.txt
mv cookiesnew.txt cookies.txt
echo "done"
Just replace $profile with the profile string for your install (it'll be in that directory) and run the script. It'll remove all your browser cache and history, as well as any cookies not explictly mentioned in the egrep statement above. Set it to run on log out and the advertisers will have one heck of a time trying to track you from day to day.
Why did I use shred (destroy the file) instead of rm (remove the file)? Because I'm one of the lunatic fringe that prefers it when a file that he's deleted is, um, deleted. Call me crazy.
Get Perpendicular!
Posted on 2005-04-09 at 08:01
You don't see corporate ads like this very often. I dig it. It's still an ad, and ads are of the devil, but as devilish lies to the common man go, this one's pretty catchy!
The FCC does, in fact, control all things...
Posted on 2004-11-17 at 08:03
...at least according to them. Now, hopefully, the EFF and others can convince a judge the FCC is wrong so that we can watch our damn TV without a robotic assistance there to prevent us from harming the industry.
The future of media
Posted on 2004-05-26 at 08:01
Physical media (CD's, DVD's, Tapes, Records, etc...) is dying. Good riddance, I say. Mark my words, within 10 years, we will be replacing the format wars (e.g., Betamax vs VHS, DVD-A vs SACD, etc...) with the codec wars (MP3 vs Ogg, Mpeg vs WMV, etc...). Frankly, codec wars are far easier to handle. Software upgradable solutions are always preferable to hardware upgradable ones. I look forward to a day when all data is tranferred in real time between systems without the need for an intervening physical medium. Purchase an album and have it downloaded to your home media server. Rent a movie and have it downloaded to your movie player on the fly. Home theater racks will shrink in size as the AV receiver starts to handle more and more of the functionality that the DVD player, the CD player, the VCR, the TiVo, and all the other stuff used to handle for it. No need for all that stuff if the receiver can just fill the void with the right codec! I can't wait. Now, how do we fit linux into that future?
Random CD facts
Posted on 2004-04-30 at 08:03
The CD holds 72 minutes worth of music. Why? Because Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was that long. Seems like a reasonable mark to shoot for.
Also, the sampling rate was decided by a surfing contest between a Sony exec and a Philips exec. That's progress.
Bittorrent + RSS
Posted on 2004-03-16 at 08:01
I read an interesting article on "Broadcaching". This is an idea that, I believe, foreshadows the way things will be. As things stand, RSS is a simple Pull technology but that is simply not scalable enough in the long term for real data broadcasting. Neither is it's counterpart, Push technology. We need to explore better and more complex models to enable the killer networking apps of the future.
Hitachi-based TiVos?
Posted on 2004-03-10 at 08:03
Hitachi is coming out with a 400GB drive...and it spins at 7200rpm! Couple that with TiVo's recent claims about a new HiDef TiVo unit on the horizon and you may have a match made in heaven. Sweet!