I was inspired by this post to start using Feedburner to supply the news feeds for letterneversent.com. If you subscribe to the original RSS feeds you do not need to change anything unless you wish to use the feedburner feeds, which will provide some useful features like integration with my del.icio.us links as well as browser-friendly display and nice statistics on how many people subscribe and what they use to view the feed.
General
17
Mar 05
For my upcoming birthday
If you have an extra several thousand dollars lying around we can throw a huge birthday bash and book Teddy Pendergrass.
Related:
17
Mar 05
Altruism and punishment
Very interesting stuff on the evolution of altruism. What is the evolutionary incentive for acting in ways that do not benefit the individual? From the New Scientist via Life With Alacrity:
17
Mar 05
The Paradox of Choice
I saw this interesting book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, at Border’s during lunch. The main thrust of it is that our lives are filled with an overwhelming amount of choice, which ends up restricting our own satisfaction with life. Modern life is filled with too much sometimes. I agree with that. I even felt this when I was in the book store. There were so many things I could have looked at that I felt uninterested in shopping around. I just didn’t want to deal with it. It’s the same reason I don’t go to a lot of places. It is too much trouble to navigate all the chaos and the array of endless junk. Maybe the human mind works on a much smaller scale.
17
Mar 05
Graffiti link-o-rama
- The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal: graffiti removal as art. The squarish areas to cover graffiti as minimalist works. Can graffiti removal be an artistic response?
- GRAFFITI REMOVAL: basic technical advice from English Heritage after damage by vandals to historic buildings and monuments
- Comprehensive Wikipedia entry on graffiti including types, methods, history, etc. Informative!
- Online graffiti generator.
- Banksy, graffiti as subversive art. His work is creative and effective.
In thinking about the subject, it is clear that graffiti can operate from many angles. In essence it is a mode of communication. I’m hesitant to use the word “expression” because it’s a loaded term that conveys legitimacy. As a form of communication, it comes in many varieties: political graffiti, graffiti art, advertising, gang-related tagging, drunk shaming, culture jamming (subvertising), etc. How do you decide when it’s a positive thing or a negative thing? I suppose it all depends on point of view, and if that’s the case whose point of view wins out when there is a conflict?
17
Mar 05
Food for thought: pain weapons
I was just reading a little blurb at BoingBoing that had to do with plasma-based, non-lethal weaponry that the US government is working on. They have been developing non-lethal weapons for some time, sticky sprays that glom onto adversaries, high-powered stink bombs to drive away crowds, directed energy weapons that cause intense pain (euphemistically called Active Denial Systems), etc.
In a Clausewitz-ian sense, it illustrates that the true objective of nation-state warfare is about control and establishing authority rather than destruction and violence, even if violence is used to gain those objectives. Non-lethal weaponry also provides arguable benefit for those seeking authority via force:
- Diminishes outrage at civilian casualties due to non-lethal means of coercion. This prevents using these casualties as justifications for violent opposition or revenge.
- Insulates armed-forces from internal problems of conscience due to diminished deadly violence.
- Non-lethal force can be applied widely and with less discrimination.
- Negates the effectiveness of mass gathering or “protests”. Dispersal is effective and immediate.
- Forces who use non-lethal weaponry can cloak themselves under a non-violent moralism. In other words, occupation forces would draw a moral distinction between themselves and armed insurgents.
11
Mar 05
Bullet points from my little corner of world
- I just counted the number of RSS feeds I have in my Sage sidebar for Firefox and it’s nearing seventy. Yikes. That’s seventy websites I refresh every five to ten minutes in OCD fashion.
- I got my bonus today. Time to take care of a few things that have fallen by the way side. That reminds me, taxes suck. My priority for 2005 is to keep track of all my receipts, mileage, and expenses so I can itemize my deductions for my next return. I ended up costing myself some money this year due to not keeping track of all the things I am legally allowed to deduct from my taxes. Alan Greenspan recently advocated a consumption tax as opposed to an income tax, which makes sense to me, although it creates a disincentive to consumer spending which currently accounts for seventy percent of our gross national product. Can taxes function as anything other than a disincentive? I think it’s more likely to be a consumption disincentive than an income disincentive. Income tax is a lot less visible, whereas if you had to pay a federal sales tax it would be something that touched you every day in a palpable way.
- There was an interesting thread on the WoW Warlock discussion forum asking: “What is your job?” IRL (In Real Life), as opposed to in World of Warcraft, of course. Not suprisingly, most of the people were employed in some fashion in high-tech. It might be interesting to see if certain personalities are drawn more to certain player classes (warlock, priest, rogue, etc.) I like warlocks because of the demonic aspect, you know, deriving your magical abilities by flirting with damning, infernal powers. From a game aspect, it’s a very flexible class that takes a lot of micromanagement as far as your spells and abilities, but if you spend time playing and working on different strategies it is very powerful. In PvP situations I often win unless the opponent is very strong defensively like a Druid or Paladin.
09
Mar 05
The ‘Me’ Generation: Adultolescents
Almost everyone I know and work with is an “adultolescent” as defined in the book, “Mediated: The Hidden Effects of Media on People, Places, and Things”, myself included. That is one of the issues I’m having with working for a video game company. I feel like I’m ready to work and spend time around mature adults. The problem is I just don’t know any. Maybe they don’t even exist. I’m getting to a point where I’m tired of living in grown-up-kid land where everyone floats around aimlessly dreaming, but not doing anything. You may ask, what is an adult anyway? I guess in my mind it is someone serious and committed to their own life, not busy avoiding life and protecting their child egos at all costs to the point of serious self-deception and fantasy. Again, this is coming from someone who hides out in books and video games, as much as I hate to acknowledge that. I guess I’m expressing a serious doubt about my own way of life. Anyway, here is an interesting article on that and what it means to be “mediated”, which is this guy’s diagnosis on our culture:
08
Mar 05
Experiencing a Shiva moment
Death and life are not two but one. You must destroy something to create something else. Creation itself can be a destructive act. Change can cause discomfort and painful uncertainty, but this discomfort is beneficial. Change is the essence of life. Everything I have learned has been the result of pain or has caused pain in some fashion. There is no comparable teacher. People simply do not learn from their success. Positive experiences do not penetrate the same way. There is an upside. Hardship can create a sense of value since real value is only understood in terms of contrast. There can be no good without bad. No understanding of value without loss. All that aside, sometimes I feel like razing the earth with the fire of my third eye as I do the dance of destruction.
