When a person is changing a light bulb, they are afraid they’ll get shocked or the glass will break and they’ll be cut. If they succeed, they are momentarily blinded while perched precariously on a chair or a table even.
All for the light.
Archive for March, 2007
So you take pictures of potholes and the local news reports them.
read more | digg story
Saw this on Technorati:
blogbullies cause Kathy Sierra to cancel ETech presentations
I dodged Kathy’s opening remarks at SXSW and now she’s in the news for this.
What effect will this have on the future of digital identity? I am delighted to see people taking on personas and exploring them deeply in a blog context. To me it’s all about facets, certain angles of identity. How do you keep your digital identity sane?
As more people pursue this, how soon before legislation arises to make it difficult? How soon before our ability to play becomes illegal within some legislative space? I think about cosplay the same way: How soon before it’s illegal? How soon before legality is just a moot point?
I thought rageboy did a good job defending himself, and yet his rebuttal was couched in the context of an email to a journalist and thus so deeply meta, that I began to question whether this was all a stunt, similar to the Kat Herding firing. Are these people all just linking themselves up to play tricks on sites like Technorati and Digg? To barter the value of their digital identities in the new tabloids? And here I am, doing my part.
If it’s true that the line blurring creating and consuming has blurred enough for retailers to resell us our own reality, haven’t we achieved some capitalist goal at last?
Napoleon:
Everything is opinion in war, opinion about the enemy, opinion about one’s own soldiers. After a lost battle, the difference between the vanquished and the victor is very little.
How much of what I do personally and professionally is merely opinion? I know that work is primarily about decisiveness. What is needed is strong opinion. Everyone feels one way or another about things, but without any extremity of opinion, there is a sort of mediocre spinning. Napoleon was decisive:
There is no need to say what one has the intention of doing at the same moment that one does it.
Intention crops up in my own writing all the time. I am searching for the intentionality of my characters. I invent them solely for the purpose of mining their intentionality. I choose their characteristics (as a matter of opinion) based on the volatility they will inject each other with. I’m concerned with that inner struggle of intention. What goes on inside a man or woman as they struggle for expression.
Napoleon was a man of action and words come from him with a density of meaning. He writes maxims. He wants impact. There is no other point to speaking. His words are actions. It is very important to establish for myself as I burrow into this new project, that I am not Napoleon. I am inventing a fiction of Napoleon that cannot be maxims. It must treat his maxims like a set of rules for his character, but even this has some bluster to it. Napoleon spoke to be heard, to create action, so the truth is not necessarily his chosen medium. And yet:
Words are everything.
What Napoleon strays towards is a philosophy of propaganda. The only reason he had for putting words together was some form of “up with Napoleon” bullshit.
Love this site: Wooster Collective
On this day of this year.
I loved his movie The Atrocity Exhibition. Here’s an interview.
I needed to do another book which appeared to be a documentary but went off in other directions.
and
I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.
I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.
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Excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by J.G. Ballard, first published in Interzone #8, 1984
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So Corsicans were considered to be the most war-like peoples of the Mediterranean. The were often embroiled in blood feuds, acting out their vendettas against each other. They were relatively easy to invade and overcome, but fierce as little dogs.
Boswell was a great admirer of Corsicans for some reason. He reported observing that they had no field surgeons. He asked the corsicans what they did when they were wounded.
“We die,” they replied.
From them came Napoleon. The name itself was worthy of taunts from the French children. And yet he staged the most magnificent snowball fights in history. He built fortifications for both sides and pitched battles through the winter.