So last night's experience with being able to instantly post pictures while on the go (or more likely, sitting in booths at a couple of bars), as well as some conversation sparked thereby, made me think about the whole landscape of, for lack of a better word, publishing (1). There's a vast spectrum of creative ease, with novels, epic films, and symphonies on one extreme, and quick little snapshots, moblog entries, and classroom rubber-band music on the other. Academic papers lie closer to the former extreme, and conventional (2) blog entries closer to the latter.
I don't favor one over the other. Certain artistic mediums foster spontaneity, others comes close to quashing it utterly. Some allow for polish and refinement, others for conditions salubrious to amateur and sloppy work. Both have merits in spades.
What really fascinated me however, is the barrier-to-entry curve for publishing. At the more time-intensive (with respect to the creative process) extreme, one needs a major press, media conglomerate, or truly sizable reputation with which to finance and distribute one's work. 180 degrees from that, one needs cutting-edge technology and some modicum of technical savvy. The barrier of deeply-entrenched and traditional mass-distribution networks and the barrier of highly-priced new technology stem from different sources and are quite qualitatively different, save for their mutual ability to preclude themselves from accessibility to the masses (ironically, the very same audience they target). The curve is U-shaped.
It takes less effort to "publish" a blog, for instance, than to do the same with a moblog, even though the creative process behind a conventional (3) blog is more time-consuming, because anyone with access to the internet (i.e. everyone with access to a public library, i.e. almost everyone) can have one hosted for free, as opposed to needing a special phone, wireless plan, and back-end software. Increase the creative scale, to the extent of a full-length novel for instance, and potential outlets dry up faster than a small Utah town on Sunday. Similarly, recording your bedroom rendition of "All along the watchtower", compressing it into an MP3 on your computer, and uploading it to mp3.com is fairly easy, but trying to stream that impromptu drum circle in the park live over the internet is a real bitch. And we all know how easy it is (4), at the polar opposite of the realm of creative effort, to have years of intense and original musical effort snatched up and pressed by a major label.
In time, advances help to extend (e.g. moblogging didn't even exist before last year) and flatten (e.g. it is cheaper, in real terms, to produce a record than it was 30 years ago; uploading pictures instantly from your phone to a website will be commonplace and cheap in a year or two) the curve, but those seeking the edges will always find it more difficult.
And that's all I have to say about that for now.
(1) Point-to-point transmissions follow a similar pattern (a formal letter vs. a telephone conversation vs. an email vs. and SMS message), but I'm going to stick to broadcasts. This also refers intrinsically to the ease not only of creation, but also dissemination - it's entirely within most people's reach to sit down and write a genuinely-decent 8-page essay for a class, or create a somewhat-catchy ditty on their aunt's guitar. The time and effort required to make such material easily and readily available to others is another matter. It is to this confluence that I will henceforth refer.
(2) i.e. entries like the one over which your eyes, glazed and unimpressed, now scan
If you plan to load a tortilla up with habenero sauce, make sure you leave a little bit untainted to help quell the inevitable firestorm which will rage over most of the surface of your tongue. The tortilla is both an accessory to the crime (aiding and abetting the demon sauce) and your salvation (the means to a new life, unfettered by incendiary woes). It was party to the original sin, but only by embracing it may you be absolved. It is this duality that makes the tortilla the most spiritual of foods.
So Dom's in town tonight, and I thought I'd try out something new. We have a couple of Nokia 3650's lying around the office and they include an "image uploader" feature that allows you to instantly upload any photo you've just taken. Not quite "moblogging", but close enough for now. The only drawback was that I thought it only worked with Ofoto, which requires registration to view someone's pictures. Knowing how lazy I would be if I were reading this, I realized this was too much effort for the typical audience member. But no longer.
So since I'm going to be taking shots (pun intended) tonight, I thought I'd put the pics up in real-time. You can check them out here, thanks to some crafty Germans. Ignore/worship the first image... it's a test.
Update: I think the date/time is GMT+2, so subtract 6 hours (00:53:02 -> 18:53:02)
Interestingly, when searching for additional resources, I found this, which is a resolution by the Texas house of representatives (Texas HR-107 instead of its federal counterpart) recognizing the ancient Macedonians as part of the Hellenic tapestry.
Stripped free of its limited ideological rhetoric (which, considering the source, is pleasantly subdued) this article makes a bevy of interesting and topical observations regarding the telos of those on the right side of the political spectrum.
"Leave me alone" is an appealing slogan, but the right regularly violates its own guiding principle. The antiabortion folks intend to use government power to force their own moral values on the private lives of others. Free-market right-wingers fall silent when Bush and Congress intrude to bail out airlines, insurance companies, banks--whatever sector finds itself in desperate need. The hard-right conservatives are downright enthusiastic when the Supreme Court and Bush's Justice Department hack away at our civil liberties. The "school choice" movement seeks not smaller government but a vast expansion of taxpayer obligations. Maybe what the right is really seeking is not so much to be left alone by government but to use government to reorganize society in its own right-wing image. All in all, the right's agenda promises a reordering that will drive the country toward greater separation and segmentation of its many social elements--higher walls and more distance for those who wish to protect themselves from messy diversity. The trend of social disintegration, including the slow breakup of the broad middle class, has been under way for several decades--fissures generated by growing inequalities of status and well-being. The right proposes to legitimize and encourage these deep social changes in the name of greater autonomy. Dismantle the common assets of society, give people back their tax money and let everyone fend for himself.
. . .
Autonomy can be lonely and chilly, as millions of Americans have learned in recent years when the company canceled their pensions or the stock market swallowed their savings or industrial interests destroyed their surroundings. For most Americans, there is no redress without common action, collective efforts based on mutual trust and shared responsibilities. In other words, I do not believe that most Americans want what the right wants. But I also think many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications for the country.
All good points, and almost all of them espouse viewpoints with which mine are consonant. The irony here though lies with the fact that, in not only carefully and accurately observing the right's ability to metamorphose itself into ostensibly a more populace-friendly entity but also astutely noting the tendency of said entity to be the persistent aggressor, Greider succumbs to two all-too-familiar failings upon which conservatives have gleefully harped for years: he has himself failed to transform his argument into one more universally accessible and free from the danger of implied (even if accidental) haughty distain as well as crafting a heavily reactive article (i.e. failing to mimic the assertive and proactive nature of his subject matter, despite admiring its success).
With regard to the first ironic aspect, phrases like "many cannot see the choices clearly or grasp the long-term implications" - whether or not they are meant to be derogatory (and in this case I do not believe that to be the subtext) - are tantamount to piles of 8-inch depleted-uranium anti-tank ammunition for the A-10 Warthog that is the right-wing PR machine, which has a field day busting holes in the legitimacy of leftist arguments by focusing on tangential side-notes and repeating them ad nauseum until it becomes the perceived gist. It unfairly exaggerates the stereotype of the modern liberal, isolated and out of touch with those he/she purports to represent, leading them along by the hand, replete with "trust me, I know what's best for you" arrogance. This is misleading and apocryphal to the populist legacy of the broad left wing. In its purest form, a progressive movement of this kind cannot distance itself from those it represents, precisely because it empowers every constituent to voice their opinions and aid in their own self-direction. It is this kind of heterogeneity - this kind of pragmatic egalitarianism - that Greider correctly observes as under siege by right-wing reactionism.
Secondly, and my criticism in this aspect - perhaps unfairly - extends far beyond the scope of this article, it is written more as a profile of a subject rather than a plan of action. This is a longstanding tradition on the left, and the machinations and strategy of the right are now well-observed and well-documented. The corpus of these studies unequivocally reveals not only the central tenet on the right of almost pathologically aggressive proactivity, but the high degree of efficacy thereof. Yet the left, and most especially its leaders, seem resigned to a strategy of cautious defensive posturing, attempting to resist whatever agenda the right sets instead of attempting to set their own. Perhaps at a macroscopic level its diversity is a hindrance to action, obfuscating a laser-like direction analogous to that of the right, but this can be compensated for with the consensus of a powerful majority. Remember, this is a movement which galvanized when a mass of Tom Jodes in the 1920's realized that together they could yell as loudly as a few Jay Gatsbys.
In other words, the left is in need of a good rebranding (just like Philip Morris and Worldcom), a little vim, and some assertiveness.
Enough pontificating for one day. Since when do I write 600-word rants about politics?
So. What happened? Why did this disappear for nearly a week?
As you may or may not know, this site is hosted, pro bono, by a coworker of mine on a server which resides in his abode, which happens to double as an ISP. His landlord / the owner of the ISP unwittingly disabled the line that services this server (also for free). It wasn't MCI after all.
I didn't realize the extent to which I had become dependent, for a variety of reasons, on having this site around, but I won't complain for a second, since I'm getting infinitely more than I pay for.
Anyway, I took the opportunity to redesign the site. Now you get pithy self-effacing quips in the header, and the random links have moved to the sidebar. I enlarged the font a tad, as some people had remarked that it was causing acute myopia. Oh, and the overarching aesthetic tone is a bit lighter. It's also a much more maintainable design, continuing the trend of increased reliance on CSS. If you want (more) nerdy details, I'll give them*.
And that's that.
*no one ever actually asks for these, but I still feel the need to offer
I just downloaded 246 pictures, via my dad, of my parents’ recent trip to Hawaii. Approximately 20% of the pictures included some sort of fowl as their primary or tertiary subject. I found this disturbing. Since retiring, my father has demonstrated a disturbing predilection for snapping photos of the ducks which inhabit our pool, and I see an ominous trend developing. I hope it’s not congenital.
As a follow up to the last post, here’s an interesting article comparing the current state of online music distribution to the 19th century coal industry. Makes sense. I’d like to see many more analogies along these lines, like how the modern plight of Jellybean entrepreneurs is like that of ancient Sumerian rye-huskers and such.
Also, Tim O’Reilly sounds off with some logical points from this 12/02 article.
More pertinent developments concerning the DMCA (which I’ve written about here). I have no problem with their enforcing copyright protections in theory, but the rabid way the RIAA is going about it (and has been for years) convinces me that they want to do anything but offer a viable alternative. People will not only pay for this stuff if the price is right and it’s convenient, but will prefer it over free, hassle-laden and time-intensive illegal services. The amount of money they must have spent on lobbying and legal fees alone would have been good angel funding for a venture in the right direction. Anyway, draw your own conclusions.
I was at a summertime party at some unspecific person's house, and was sitting on the couch watching some late-night talk show, being re-aired during the day, with the toddler son of the house's owners. One of the guests happened to be actor Tim Robbins. The show broke for commercial and an ad for the Intel Pentium 4 processor appeared, punctuated by the standard branding jingle at the end (doo-dink-doo-dink!), which seemed to greatly trouble the young lad at my side. When the talk show resumed, he gently tugged at my sleeve.
"Who is that?" the doe-eyed child inquired.
"That's Tim Robbins. He's an actor."
"Can you take me to see him?"
"Ok."
At this point, I put the young boy - in his stroller - in a enormous attaché case and (after flippantly remarking to the parents, "it's allright, I'm not going to molest him") hauled him down to Mr. Robbins' office. His assistant let us in immediately.
Tim was sitting at his desk, with a cigar dangling from his lips, in what seemed to be a remarkably similar approximation of his office in "The Player". In response to his (justified) question as to why I requested to see him, I produced from within my case the young child, still in his stroller.
At that point the boy confessed to Mr. Robbins and myself that he'd hacked into several US department of defense supercomputers and ("Wargames"-style) initiated the launch of our entire nuclear arsenal, thereby provoking a Russian counter-strike, in an attempt to annihilate all of human existence. Why? Because his parents, scared of his nigh-preternatural intelligence, had hired several teams of psychologists to analyze and study him. These teams had run a variety of tests on the child from infancy onward, one of which involved being locked in a cage with rabbits (he showed us some video footage of this and I can confirm it must have been unpleasant). Upon seeing the advert for the Intel Pentium 4 processor, he came to the realization that technology, ever-advancing, would continue to provide new tools to be used by these scientists tasked with getting inside the inscrutable little tyke's head. He couldn't let that happen, and had decided to kill everyone on Earth as a result. The missiles were on their way already, and this fate was inevitable (at this point I became detached from the physical location in which I'd found myself, as is common in dreams, and scenes of what people were engaged in as the rockets detonated flashed before me, the only one of which I can now recall being a mariachi band playing in the desert).
I reacted insouciantly. Mr. Robbins turned a ghastly shade of white, his jaw slackening just enough to let the cigar drop from his mouth. He pointed out that committing species-wide genocide for the sake of getting the psychologists off of his back was a bit selfish. They boy replied that he hadn't thought of that.
To make a long story slightly less long, the entire dream turned out to be a trailer for some post-apocalyptic piece of cinematic hack work. All the events up to that point were merely the prologue to a bizarre movie about rival warlords (played by Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin) feuding for scarce resources in the aftermath of nuclear winter. From what I saw in the rest of the trailer, it didn't really look like a winner; it relied too much on star power and some really graphic gun-fighting.
One could use this as a soapbox to rant about the pervasive and insidious nature of the modern entertainment industry inculcating my mentality to the point that I can't even have a simple dream about nuclear holocaust without 1) it involving movie celebrities, 2) it being a awful patchwork amalgamation of hollywood films (replete with tired plot lines), and 3) having the dream eventually spiral into a meta-dream where the previous dream turned out to be a movie itself. I won't do that though.
The actual events I remember from last night:
Having breakfast.
Drinking all day.
Losing a game of darts. Continuing to drink.
Embarrassing myself in front of coworkers.
Maybe getting pizza.
Seeing a crappy concert by a good band. Frustrating.
Going to another bar.
Embarrassing myself in front of friends (piggy-back rides? wtf?)
Sobering up just enough to realize I should go home.
So now, in terms of the memory allocated for remembering the events of the past 24 hours, about 20% is dedicated to real-life events with real consequences, and about 80% to some weird it's-the-end-of-the-world-but-not-really-psych! subconscious fantasy. There's also plenty of irony involved, as the dream was far more vivid than the real events and the real events far more oneiric than the dream. Awesome.
I’m generally of the mindset that basic elements of human nature (greed, sloth, self-actualization, break-dancing) have existed for ages, and will continue to exist in a state of homeostasis, influenced, but not qualitatively altered, by their political, social, and economic context. The contemporary western penchant for quality automobiles with GPS navigation systems differs not from the Roman warrior-aristocrats’ lust for gilded chariots, and so on and so forth. Dictatorships have lessened in number, but not in their maniacal attitudes. Friends still like to hang out and clothe themselves in womb-like blankets of mutual intoxication. Some people still prefer monogamy, and others don’t.
The pendulum of human events swings back and forth, but the great gravitas of our disposition enforces an invisible mean. For the most part, at least.
Politics is perhaps one of the most static of human endeavors with respect to its infatuation with the grandiose. Leaders, or those seeking to lead, are given to use of hyperbolic rhetoric with alarming frequency, the outrageousness of their polemical discourse often exceeded only by the lunacy of their personal flamboyance. It is the case today as much as ever.
Perhaps you doubt.
The denizens of the first century had Caligula, those of the 19th, King Ludwig, but who will carry the torch for the postmodern era?
Some of you will find this funnier than others. I personally find it uproarious. I present this little gem of self-mockery upon which I serendipitously stumbled during my walk home.
Minor aesthetic metamorphosis. Heavier on CSS, but still using tables for the high-level layout. This was prompted by the installation of CVS on the new server, which makes this change virtually risk-free, since I can revert at any time.
I took a photograph a little while back from the 14th floor studio of Mr. Chia's employer. Here's what it looks like on a sunny, stellar day. It's panoramtastic!
Caveat: the largest of the images is around 700kb, go easy.
UPDATE: It's no longer panoramtastic. It's now panarific.
I really thought about mugging the man standing next to me on the subway this morning for his umbrella. It was clearly of exquisite craftsmanship and far superior to mine in several aspects. The matte-grey finish of his handle seemed to mock the gaudy black sheen of mine in the manner that old money scoffs at the nouveau-riche, dismissing its very existence as adventitious and irrelevant. Each raindrop proved a shimmering pearl of strident distain and elitist contempt; smug reminders my device’s inferior water-repellency. Each inner joint of his skeletal metal framework appeared complex, elegant, and sturdy. Mine were visibly warped and anemic, if still attached at all.
I began to undergo the mental wrestling match which every man or woman must endure in this situation: should I let the man be, or snap my sweatshop-crafted umbrella shaft in two, forming a makeshift shiv in the process, let loose an ululant shriek, skewer my adversary through the abdomen (making sure to penetrate one or more of the following vital organs: the liver, the pancreas, the kidney - twisting whilst thrusting for maximum penetration), and take advantage of his shock to snatch the aristocratic accessory causing my anguish from his now-tense, but terror-weakened, hands, timing my assault perfectly as to facilitate an expedient exit as the car halts at 34th st / Penn Station?
I chose the former. I am a disgrace to the bourgeois (but I make a mean quesadilla).
In keeping with today’s emerging theme of unexpected armchair activism, here’s an ACLU report on the state of civil liberties online (somewhat annoyingly titled "cyber-liberties"). It’s over a year old, and a little off-putting in its use of alarmist bombast, but still remains topical and relevant.
If I'm getting too preachy let me know. If you want to see me naked, fat chance, psycho.
Certain states (oh, let’s say about 16-ish) are considering or have passed laws extending the DMCA which have been so egregiously drafted that when adhering to the exact letter of the law such acts as possessing technology capable of concealing the origin and/or destination of any transmission would be illegal. While the intent is admirable (stopping illicit use of cable, telecom, and data services) this is common practice in the world of network security, to such an extent that almost every operating system has included this, in some form or another (NAT or Network Address Translation, for example; also heavily utilized by firewalls), for upwards of 4 years. If fully regulated, these statues would make 95% of computer users criminals. This is clear evidence that, in the words of Lawrence Lessig, "these laws look like they have been drafted by people who have lived on another planet these past 5 years." It’s just ignorant and inept lawmaking, exacerbated by the zealous lobbyists from the RIAA and MPAA. It’s like trying to stop drunk driving by making it a crime to operate an internal combustion engine - noble goal, ignoble approach.
And this is only one provision of the bills.
Edward Felten, who has blogged about this issue fervently, has an excellent summary page as well.
UPDATE: Here's an example of how it can be used maliciously and predatorily. If you leave loopholes/ambiguities of this size open for abuse, someone will inevitably abuse them (although this particular case is a pretty clear-cut violation of non-DCMA copyright laws - but the fact that Lexmark even brought the DCMA into it is scary).
I’m not generally a Glenn Reynolds fan, but there are issues on which our viewpoints are coterminous. Anticompetitive collusion by the recording industry to create a cartel stranglehold over any and all media distribution is one of them.
The really awful thing about the Neoterik™ Baby Hood is that it's only designed for small children and infants. We finally have an excuse to fulfill the well-suppressed fantasies of millions of American adults (cocooning oneself in a tiny hermetically-sealed chamber, fully removed from the outside world, save for a transparent plastic viewing window, free to wallow in self-contempt and smug detachment as you finally shed all allusions of having any semblance of a life - it's very Zen, go with it) and they go ahead and make it for babies. You have to live long and hard to thirst for the kind of isolation the “Baby” Hood provides, and I doubt some little tyke who can't even pronounce “social anxiety disorder” will truly appreciate it. Unless she/he was born with ectopia cordis, in which case it's probably not all that different from the claustrophobic intensive care unit in which she/he has been sealed since birth. In the event of such a tragedy, my heart goes out to her/him (this may be the most offensive pun of all time).
Weather got you down? Relationship on the rocks? Ebola causing you to "vomit a black 'sludge' of blood and disintegrated internal organs"?
Just flash that winning smile.
That's right - flash it. Show the world who's boss. You've worked too damn hard, and put way too much money into diligent professional dental care, not to display that set of shining pearly whites.
When Sergei's authority as underboss was in jeopardy and he had to act swiftly and unequivocally to quash any latent subordination, whose family did he coldly eviscerate?
Yours. And what did you do? That's right - opened up those quivering lips and let him see your alabaster-hued enamel toolbox, reflecting anew the unwavering loyalty you'd shown him these past 13 years. That you did it at gunpoint is irrelevant - you would have done the same when acting of your own free will. You owed Sergei that much. What's more: you owed it to yourself.
So keep smiling. Who knows? You might make a friend. This round might be on the bartender. Your wife might volunteer to shoot you up first this time. That is, if she were still alive.
I just downloaded 246 pictures, via my dad, of my parents’ recent trip to Hawaii. Approximately 20% of the pictures included some sort of fowl as their primary or tertiary subject. I found this disturbing. Since retiring, my father has demonstrated a disturbing predilection for snapping photos of the ducks which inhabit our pool, and I see an ominous trend developing. I hope it’s not congenital.
