I read that the term 'blogosphere' is independent of esr or his habit of coinage. But he still loves to invent words; just read his version of the jargon file. There's controversy in the dweeb community over to what extent esr has co-opted the jargon file for his own self-promotion needs. Esr's adding all kinds of terms to jargon file sort of makes one wonder what gives him the right to do so; he's become an active participant in his own anthropology to the point where it's making his own analyses meaningless. He's in no way compensating for the heisenberg effect.
OOPS. I had sworn I would stop doing that -- throwing around terminology and concepts about which I have only a humanities-related grasp. Still reeling from the sokal hoax here...in therapy...taking meds...doing ok.
Of course, there's a little esr in all of us: a personality who loves to make categorical analyses about human culture, thus implying his own superiority to it all. This is the same phenomenon that can be observed in students of psychology: they are handed tools of categorization and language, and it is often thought that applying them to what they perceive somehow implies their own transcendening of their own arbitrary categories. It's like being a priest and sitting there at your pulpit, preaching about the sin and moral degradation of humanity while being a big old human yourself. So yes -- a little esr in all of us. But esr takes it to that proverbial next level.
I have to include another link for public consideration. apparently, the u.s. Military is sniffing around the inuit population of canada for military recruits, because its own army is in danger of being stretched thin. How much longer can things like this go on before the entire world joins forces to oust the u.s. From its throne?
'The way some Canadians see it, the U.S. Has already stolen their oil and gas, metals, diamonds, and water, and owns much of their industry. Now their manpower? Even the most laid-back of our neighbors to the north think this is going a bit far.'
America vs. the world...stay tuned!
Ok, one more final procedure for archiving my blog (i made available links to individual entries, thus necessitating a change in archiving procedure -- at this point, I have no secret issues about my blog. I swear):
Other changes are that instead of always editing the same file, I'll be editing 0011.html, 0012.html, etc. So, I'll have to type 'vim 0011.html' instead of simply 'blog,' relying on an alias that launches vim on my index page. I'll also have to put in the link at the beginning of every entry, but that's really no big deal since only a few numbers change from the last entry's link. OH! I could put in a generic number-less link in my template. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha
This is, by the way, as low as you can possibly go: blogging about your blog. Just for future reference...
Here is the procedure for archiving my blog (again I use the ‹ol› tag):
noah grey can kiss my ass. No, that's not nice -- he wrote some really great perl scripts that do make commentable blogs insanely easy, and he gives them away for free. But if you google on 'greymatter sucks', you'll find a lot of bloggers grumbling about greymatter not working, or asserting that it's more fun to hand-code a blog, or just expressing vague discomfort that they have to use someone else's tool to express themselves. Haha, many of us are in the same boat: an inner struggle with the decision to employ or eschew greymatter when writing our web-blogs, which of course are all vitally important to the collective consciousness. The well-known right-wing, self-promoting dweeb esr has described this collective blog-consciousness as the 'blogosphere,' but he also goes on to imply that everyone in the blogosphere shares his political views, so maybe we ought not be paying too much attention to esr's cyber-soapbox pontificating. He's been going strong for some time now, and shows no signs of tiring.
Inventing words (like 'blogosphere') is just about the most power-hungry thing one can do. I do it from time to time.
I used to think I was missing out on something by not giving to my audience (which comprises 3 people, including myself) the options of posting pithy comments or linking to individual entries, but I've changed my tune. People don't often leave comments on weblogs, and when they do, they're not the most profound musings in the world. And who cares about linking. Grrr ::inner torment::
james told me that my blog was boring, and I realize that it is. No one is interested in reading it except for myself and ana. Oh well, I guess the nice thing about a blog is that it's essentially a diary; the writing therein is for me. So, if you, human, don't want to read my hyper-intelligent blog, then that's just fine. Being an egomaniac, I like the attention, but this blog largely serves the purpose of elucidating my own thoughts. FUCK YOU. Haha, just kidding. But I hate humans, really. They should all die.
Maybe I should password-protect my blog -- exclusion is always fun.
I'm so tired of losing bits of my blog. This is the third time it's happened. This time, I lost part of today's entry when I was re-designing for ease-of-archiving purposes. I ftp-ed everything to my home machine to make it easier, and then blogged some more online. Then, I deleted everything online and ftp-ed my offline files back to the server after re-designing them, thus stupidly erasing the blogging I had done after ftp-ing the first time. Fuck everything; I don't even remember what I had said. Oh yeah -- I think it was something about blogs and how they contribute to social isolation. I also talked about how my blog is much cooler now that I've re-designed it. Haha, blogs are so stupid. Also, I mentioned that I don't *really* hate all humans.
I think I should address something else, albeit something related: how this blog makes me angry. The internet makes me angry. Rather, internet personalities make me angry. Reading other people's blogs makes me angry. Any time someone calls attention to themselves on the internet, it makes me angry. But at the same time, I enjoy it, and I find that I spend a lot of time reading blogs and looking at personal sites. It's like I love to hate the authors; it fills me with a kind of vital rage that is empowering in some primal, visceral way.
I find that when I write on the internet, it makes me very bellicose; my writing is much more aggressive online than it is off, and I don't really understand why this is. I guess I do, on some level -- it's because I'm an aggressive, violent guy, and my natural impulse when I perceive another human presence is to kill. But I'm also very nice -- just ask my mommy. But there's something about the internet that raises the hair on the back of my neck, and I don't think this is a syndrome limited to me; many other bloggers and internet personalities come across as egomaniacal, snappish assholes. The atmosphere of general assholishness that permeates usenet is a good example of the internet's effect on temperament.
The internet breeds social aggression.
Does this mean that this is our natural state? That we'd all like to be barking viciously and baring our teeth at other humans as they pass?
Theory: social isolation breeds solipsism and egomania, because the only company one has in a socially isolated situation is one's self, and interacting with one's self constitutes stroking and feeding the ego. Moreover, egomania breeds aggression, simply because thinking one is better than everyone else demands that one debase, subjugate and dominate others.
But I think I'm worse than the average internet-prick. Why am I such an asshole? Rage and competitive impulses dominate my inner landscape. I think I need yoga, transcendental meditation, or some similar bullshit to sooth my fevered brow.
I don't think I'm in any way dangerous; instead of hitting random people on the street, I take it all out on myself (and the walls of my mother's house) during my private rants and raves. I'm just an angry person -- I have a problem with rage. I'd like to be more at peace, but I'm also extremely lazy. And, as I like to say, they'll never take me alive.
It's funny that I went back to edit the grammar of this rant.
HO HO HO. Today we celebrate the day santa died for our sins. Or, alternatively, the day jesus flies around from house to house dropping sugar-cookies and beastwars transformers down our chimneys.
I've been meaning for some time to explain exactly why christianity is stupid, in fact more so than other religions. This is not to say that other religions aren't stupid -- they very much are. But christianity takes it to a whole new level.
I like the list format, as employed in yesterday's entry on why canada is better than the u.s., mainly because I get to use the ‹ol› tag. But here are the reasons christianity is a bad, stupid, unthinking, harmful way to live your life:
So, don't go to church. Sitting down and standing up in unison, singing dreadfully out-of-tune hymns, and eating lemon squares in the church basement only serves to bring you a bit closer to death, in so many ways. Church serves a legitimate social function, but are these the people with whom you really want to be socializing?
I've been thinking, lately, that I want to formally renounce my baptism and confirmation. I think what I'd do would be to send letters to the lutheran church of the cross and royal victoria hospital. Hey, I already burned a bible in my backyard bbq grill -- the remains are still there as a warning to christians, like a head hanging outside the gates of a medieval town.
I'm waiting to see if I am invited to james's father's house for dinner. If not, then I will go have christmas eve dinner at subway. It's not as depressing as you think, really. Well, the possibility exists that they're not open. If that's the case, then I'll have spaghetti.
So tomorrow is the big day! I wrapped sarah's present, and hopefully I don't forget it when I go over to drumm avenue tomorrow mid-day. I'll pick up my mom later at the metro, at seven o'clock in the evening or so.
I've (mostly) cleaned up the house, per my mom's request, so she can enjoy a filth-free post-xmas familial celebration. I guess that's when my 'real' xmas will be -- the 26th. That's when katy gets to open her presents, among them an extra-long sweater made especially for dachshunds. Really, ours is a decadent country; there's just no denying it.
Trying to get a sense for a national mood, character, or culture in canada would be an interesting project. This has been journalistically explored before, however. It's a fleeting thing, the canadian national identity, and so it's open to the lofty, literary speculation that intellectually self-indulgent writers like to masturbate over.
Canada has, when compared to the u.s.:
This is not to say that america isn't a great country. Well, it used to be, at least. But canada is just better; no hard feelings, eh?
I just lost another big chunk of entry because of the clumsiness of vim's interface, my own ineptitude, or some combination. This time, I just pushed the wrong button on the keyboard and deleted a huge chunk. Before I realized it, I had quit. There's no undo across sessions of vim. It wasn't a brilliant philosophical treatise or anything, but rather just what I did today and what I'm going to do this evening, complaining about the weather, and chuckling over the fact that I discovered esr's mailing address with u.s. Geological survey maps compared to mapquest street maps and carefully targeted google searches. I was going to post the information here, but I don't want to get arrested if someone burns down esr's house. Man, I wish hadn't have lost that entry; losing work really hurts, regardless of how small or insignificant a project it was. And, I must reiterate, this *never* happens in quite the same way as on a computer. With no other medium is there the danger of your creative output simply 'disappearing' with the push of a button or a power failure. In some ways, computers are easier to control than the rest of reality, but in some ways they're harder.
I am blogging from james's house. He happens to have putty installed on his mom's computer, so here I am, sitting in james's living room, listening to james and his brother talk about who had eaten the tray of peppermint brownies. Does this represent some great leap forward, that I went over to james' s house and I continue to blog? Hmm. I feel that my blogging is actually *more* convenient than it is for people who have installed greymatter, moveable type, etc, and blog using a cgi interface on the web. I simply ssh into my unix account and edit the html file directly with vim.
I asked james and eddie what dinner will be, and JAMES IS WATCHING ME AND I CAN'T WRITE MY BLOG ANYMORE AAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRG
I'm interested in approaching a transformative hermeneutics of place, space and meaning as they interpolate memory and culture.
The sad thing is, that almost makes sense. I really need to just open up 'intro to marketing' and start reading. I'm starting to wonder about a third category of competence/intelligence, along with creative-types and math/science-types. I guess I could call them 'practical types,' like james's brother, eddie. Ok, here's his story, in a nutshell: he went to west point, majored in geography, went into the army special forces, got a masters in government administration, and then an mba. He likes to do orienteering, which as I understand it is a kind of race through the wilderness with a compass and a map. He works for ibm now, in their business consulting department. He's a really nice, smart guy, and I respect him a lot, despite the fact that he doesn't fit perfectly into my model of 'right brained' versus 'left brained.' his intelligence, I think, could be described as sort of a practical competence that he's clearly taken to just about the highest degree possible.
So, we have three categories now: artsy, nerdy, and practical. I know, I know.
Katy and I went for a 2-hour walk this morning, through the state park and a few neighborhoods. Now, she's sleeping in a patch of sunshine on the carpet.
I should go food shopping, and get some food to sustain me when james's parents aren't available to keep my belly full. I want odwalla shakes, but they're $3 a piece, which is just silly, considering that they're sold in something like 8-ounce bottles. I think I'll get burritos again -- those patio burritos are great; less than a dollar a piece. Even though patio is a subdivision of con-agra foods, which is just clearly the enemy.
Seriously, boycott con-agra. they're evil. I suspected that a monolithic food-industry conglomerate would be ill-regarded by the hippie-nerds of the internet, and I was right. Of course, I make it sound like disapproval of con-agra and similar institutions constitutes that supposed hypocritical brand of hippy-ish 'non-conformity through conformity' that suits and other societal drones always cite as the reason they know the score, while hippies don't. This is not the case. Con-agra and the food-processing industry do bad, bad things, many of which are detailed in eric schlosser's _fast food nation_, which I've actually read (shock).
Huge food-processing companies like con-aga tend to treat their employees and contractors (notably small farmers) poorly, and of course they do things to their animals that you don't even want to know about.
I don't have to worry about all of this when I buy my burritos, however, because I'm an artist. Everyone else has to accept that particular social responsibility, but I can pass eating patio burritos off as a dada performance piece, and assert that buying con-agra products actually constitutes a political statement against the company. You're obviously too banal and pedestrian to understand, so I'll just smirk at you between bites of my burrito.
Hmm, I actually started to convince myself not to buy con-agra products. Oh well, best not to think about it.