Letter Never Sent

1. Sounding dirty: Went to the dentist today for the first time in a long while and was orally violated with x-rays, cameras, cheek spreaders, and sharp hooks a-scraping. I learned a few things. Namely that I’m a “grinder”, apparent by the wear on my rear molars that has made them flatter than normal. This is could be caused by my bite, which is “open” meaning my front and back teeth touch at the same time. Normally when you bite down your front teeth should touch and your back teeth should have a gap between top and bottom. Apparently, I also grind my teeth while sleeping. The upside is that my teeth are feeling nice and clean albeit a little sore.
2. Visited the print shop to have some envelopes done. Note to self: if I ever run a print shop it should have an organized reception area for customers with places to sit, available paper samples, and a catalog of past work they have done. At the bare minimum there should be someone on hand to guide the customer through the process. I asked so many questions I felt like I was doing their job for them. I need information on what services are available, the cost, and examples of past work. I told them I’ll see how they handle the envelopes before I bring them anything else since some of their paper cutting seemed a little ragged on the few samples available.
3. Deja vu all over again: 1967: “United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.”

When I need a quick dose of human reality (or voyeurism?) I visit grouphug, the anonymous confession website. Some confessions are heart-wrenching, but many are as you would expect, portraying the most widespread and ordinary themes of human suffering: lust, heartbreak, frustration, depression, loss, rage, and pain. It would be interesting to break down the confessions into types. Here’s one I found funny due to its wiseass disingenuousness and its reference to the movie, Breaking Away.

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I am a cutter too, I guess. My friends and I are all cutters. Our dads work in Indiana at a rock quarry. I am an excellent cyclist and my friend Dennis is not too bad either. One time he swam into a flooded quarry and pretended to be locked into a refridgerator. So the Italian cycle team is coming to our tonw to ride in the big race, the local college is having a race before hand that I think i can win. Once a I was practicing riding my ten speed on the Interstate and this truck driver was sticking his hand out eh window to let me know hiow fast i was going then a cop pulled him over. hahahaa

I think sometimes I forget the actual space my body takes up or how my arms, legs, and shoulders move because I am always hitting stuff by accident. I’ll pass through a door and slam my shoulder into the door jamb or I’ll knock my hand against the corner of a wall. Yesterday when I went out for a bike ride I tried to use the tire pump that plugs into my cigarette lighter. When I got out of the car after plugging in the tire pump I somehow jerked the cord out with me and pulled the end of it completely out. Now my cigarette lighter and power door locks don’t work so it must be really broken. Maybe it blew a fuse or something. The point is, it sucks.

Today was eventful in a small and pleasant way. I met my new neighbor, a young guy who’s a police officer at the APD, and had a nice chat with him before I borrowed Jody’s bike to go riding around by myself. It was bright and sunny with an invigorating chill to the air. I rode down Lamar to Barton Creek then around the lake past all the Sunday joggers and dog walkers. Then I just explored around Zilker Park a bit enjoying the weather and the people watching. During the course of my circuit, I encountered something I had never seen or knew about before, a rail car from the Merci or Gratitude Train. Apparently, right after World War II France sent 49 train cars packed full of gifts to each state. The Gratitude train car in our state is right near the lake at the house that is now an American Legion Hall. This website has a wealth of information on the subject along with photos of many of the individual train cars from each state:

The Merci Train was a train of 49 French railroad box cars filled with tens of thousands of gifts of gratitude from at least that many individual French citizens. They were showing their appreciation for the more than 700 American box cars of relief goods sent to them by (primarily) individual Americans in 1948. The Merci Train arrived in New York harbor on February 3rd, 1949 and each of the 48 American states at that time received one of the gift laden box cars. The 49th box car was shared by Washington D.C. and the Territory of Hawaii.

Here are some photos with expository captions from my expedition.

I work for a company that publishes video games. It’s just expected that you spend some amount of time playing games and staying current, otherwise when everyone is talking about the latest thing they’re playing you won’t know what they’re talking about. You have to stay in context.

The biggest thing to happen in a long time is Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (wikipedia entry). Everyone I know is playing it and new people get sucked in all the time. It is that good. I don’t even play subscription games and I’m playing it. Even people who have never played an online game before have caught the WoW bug. It’s a phenomenon.

They have sold somewhere around 500,000 copies of the game and their current active subscribers are estimated at 350,000. That’s in just two months. Each one of those 350,000 people pays $14.95 a month to play. It’s no wonder traditional media giants like Fox and Viacom are itching to get a piece of online gaming action. When you compare it to the time you spend watching cable television it is not difficult to justify the expense. It is bigger than Everquest 2 and it is scaring the crap out of anyone who is expecting to compete with it in the MMO genre (Massively Multiplayer Online games, as they say in the biz). The game is just that good. It is not revolutionary, but it takes ideas from everywhere and does everything well. Quality speaks for itself. WoW removes any arguments for producing a bad game. A game can be done of the highest calibre.

If you’re looking for a new experience, World of Warcraft is a game that’s fun, accessible, flexible and deep. Check out their website and let me know what you think. I’m the warlock “Sivori” on Sargeras server. Send me a message and we’ll go fishing.

Today I had to laugh when I saw the following press release from Wired Magazine: “WIRED Magazine Announces Nominees for Sixth Annual Wired Rave Awards“. The most cursory investigation reveals evidence of Wired’s continued conflicts of interest passed off as journalistic appreciation, this time in the way it promotes its business / advertising partners for their apparently meaningless Rave awards.

I’d love a little info on the nomination process as at least two of the five nominated blogs, Kevin Sites Blog and Wonkette (owned by Gawker Media Corp.), have direct business relationships to Wired Media. It should be no surprise that nominees for the Rave Awards are selected and judged by the editors of Wired Magazine. If you continue down the list of nominees you might discover similar relationships, but these were the most obvious.

I detailed this sort of cross-promotion previously. In this case, it is glaring. For example, Wired Media’s resident journalist-bloggeur Xeni Jardin is credited on Kevin Sites Blog as the site producer and creator. Xeni Jardin also lists Kevin Sites Blog on her personal website as one of her projects, yet this somehow does not disqualify the site from competing for “Rave” awards promoted by her employer in the Blogger category.

Furthermore, the aforementioned Wonkette is wholly owned by Nick Denton’s corporate alter-ego, Gawker Media Corp., and staffed by paid blogger Ana Marie Cox. The fact that Ms. Cox is a paid blogging employee should be disqualifying enough, but let’s not forget that Wonkette’s parent company and Wired Media have an open business partnership involving another of Gawker Media’s hot “blogging” properties, Gizmodo. On Gizmodo’s front page they promote Wired’s Gadget Lab newsletter and have done so for many months. An exchange of lucrative advertising space and who knows what else. Gizmodo’s promotion of Gadget Lab almost certainly has more to do with promoting Wired’s own magazine subscriptions (why else would you join an email newsletter?) and advertisers than it has to do with an appreciation of gadgets.

This is exactly the sort of thing most people hate about the “blogging” world. The pretense is that these individuals craft an image of a reality that does not exist and they have that power because of their credibility as journalists and media experts. These nominated blogs and individuals are important because Wired and its editors say they are. But what if the editors / judges are friends or business partners with their subjects? Where is the line between journalistic appreciation and conflict of interest? Or, the line between blogging and advertising-driven hackery? At the very least, if you have a direct relationship with the organization in charge of the nomination and award process you should be disqualified.

I came across a brief mention of something in reading yesterday. Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, also known simply as Jean Paul, was a “German poet and writer best known for the novel Siebenkas (1796), which introduced the conept of the doppelganger or alter ego.” There is a strange overlap in the things I have been reading especially as relates to duality, etc.

Jean Paul is credited with some beautiful quotations:

• Every man has a rainy corner of his life whence comes foul weather which follows him.
• Only actions give life strength; only moderation gives it charm.
• There is a joy in sorrow which none but a mourner can know.
• Nothing is more beautiful than cheerfulness in an old face.

Here is something related that you might find interesting:

1. Kant’s “Noumenal Self” and Doppelganger in P.K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly

Is it possible to be completely honest with anyone? Family, friends, loved ones? There are so many things you want to confess, but you know your words will be lost in a rush of hurt or judgment or misunderstanding. It is better to confess some things silently to yourself alone. I will be as honest as I dare, although it is just the smallest piece of the whole I keep to myself.

This is one of those things I write that each person will receive differently. Be mindful of that.

I’m keep coming across good passages from Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character. Bear with me:

On the self and others, individualism and universalism:

It is easy to give proofs. Only brutalised criminals and insane persons take absolutely no interest in their fellow men; they live as if they were alone in the world, and the presence of strangers has no effect on them. But for him who possesses a self there is a self in his neighbour, and only the man who has lost the logical and ethical centre of his being behaves to a second man as if the latter were not a man and had no personality of his own. “I” and “thou” are complementary terms. A man soonest gains consciousness of himself when he is with other men. This is why a man is prouder in the presence of other men than when he is alone, whilst it is in his hours of solitude that his self-confidence is damped. Lastly, he who destroys himself destroys at the same time the whole universe, and he who murders another commits the greatest crime because he murders himself in his victim. Absolute selfishness is, in practice, a horror, which should rather be called nihilism; if there is no “thou,” there is certainly no “I”, and that would mean there is nothing.

There is in the psychological disposition of the man of genius that which makes it impossible to use other men as a means to an end. And this is it: he who feels his own personality, feels it also in others. For him the Tat-tvam-asi is no beautiful hypothesis, but a reality. The highest individualism is the highest universalism.

Apropos the previous post on sex differences, a friend at work sent me a link to a video (right-click to save) depicting a violent clash between a pack of lions and a pack of hyenas over a wildebeest carcass the females of the pride had killed. During the course of the video the hyenas in larger numbers manage to steal the kill from the pride. Later in the video the dominant male lion kills the hyena matriarch and her successor. This clip is edited down from documentary footage.

You might be surprised to know that hyenas and lions differ greatly in social structure and biological morphology. Hyena society is female dominant. Physically, hyena females are larger than male hyenas (females in Kruuk’s East African clans averaged 120 pounds in body weight versus 107 pounds for males) and possess similar sex organs including a “peniform clitoris” and “false scrotum”. Detailed explanation here with illustrations. Lions on the other hand, possess a similar structure to other predatory pack mammals with an alpha male and lesser males and females.