This is not Arizona; this is Afghanistan.
- - - - - - - -
I thought it was time I removed the shroud from my commercial site, but still want to mark this tragedy in some way, for this is much we can learn by remembering it.
So, I thought of a very simple javascript that allows me to do just that. On the 11th of every month, it will display a memorial image; otherwise it just displays as usual.
Here's the very simple code for you to adapt. Feel free to grab the very same image, or create your own.
var mydate=new Date()
var cdate= mydate.getDate()
if (cdate!=11)
{
document.writeln('put your usual image or text');
}
else
{
document.writeln('\<img width="314" height="307" border="0" hspace="0" vspace="0" alt="on the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, remember how we came together" src="www.grographics.com/images/911.gif"\>');
}
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As I click through photos of the devastation, my horror is mixed with guilt. I come upon a photo indistinguishable as New York. Twisted metal and smoke, it looks like the photos I see every few weeks of devastation in other cities. Why did I not feel this degree of horror when I saw those photos?
In spite of my shock at American threats to destroy entire countries on account of a minority within that country, I realize that I am nationalistic. Their pain is somehow not equal to ‘mine’, where mine is really the pain of my fellow New Yorkers directly affected by this.
So I look a bit more into the pain of the others, at the stories behind the images so similar to those of my hometown, those that never struck me as hard as the latest devastation. And I learn.
I didn't know that the U.S. bombed Palestinian homes, launched missiles into Lebanese ambulances. I didn't know that the U.S. funded the Taliban's Holy War against the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union was our cold-war enemy. I didn't know that half a million children have died in Iraq as a result of our embargo. If this is a war that we're in, then the war, using conventionally non-war weapons, has been going on for quite some time.
But Taliban leaders formally condemned the attacks. Every country in the world has spoken out officially against this attack. Why must we add to the thousands of deaths of innocent civilians with the death of thousands more innocent civilians by bombing entire countries, when every country agrees this was a terrible thing?
So I sit in my flat in London. I feel some trepidation walking through Liverpool Street station. I flinch at the sight of an airplane flying over Canary Wharf. I worry because I was grumpy when I last saw Shelly before she took her flight to Vienna. What if I never saw her again? I didn't even tell her I love her. Silly, self-infatuated notions, I know, but I've never before had to even think them.
And now I do.
My old high school is being used as a staging centre for the hospitals. The block where I used to play drunken summer bouts of whiffle-ball is covered in ash. And I realize that this has happened to people in other countries, sometimes as a result of my own country's actions. That never sunk in before.
And now it does.
- - - - - - - -
Two days after the attack, and I still can't get through on the phone to my family in New York. Fortunately, email seems to be unaffected.
This email from my brother:
‘...dad couldn't see across the car, got off and headed downtown to canal street but the A stopped at 4th street and ended, started walking downtown and saw people taking pictutes and walking towards trad center and saw the black hole at that point, then suddenly everybody started running uptown and he got out of the way into an avenue b/c he didn't want to get trampled, then some guy yelled someting about the terrorists and founf out what happened and headed uptown, then ducked under something so not to get hit by stuff then saw all the smoke and went uptown , got a subway and heard stories of people who evacuated from the trade center who said that some people chose to stay and look around on the ground floor instead of leaving cenetert. dad also said that [coming into the city that morning] he was considering going to trade center dtop with the Path train but decided not. t!
hen it took a long time to go home via ferry and nj transit.
well, i hope email doesn't get cut off by the time i press send ,see ya
bye’
- - - - - - -
As a Peace Corps Worker in Benin, West Africa, I met many Muslims who believed that Americans felt all Muslims were extremists out for blood. Indeed, many Americans do equate ‘Arab’ with extremist, and Islam with terrorism. But Allah is love just as any other religion's God is love. Living and working with people, sharing in their daily lives, we all came to see one another as fellow humans, and no-one I came to know would stand by while others blindly passed stereotypes about the American pig-dog.
I often wondered why the Peace Corps was called the Peace Corps. Truly our mandate was development, education. But now I see how getting the same dirt under our fingernails, how seeing that underneath our skin and garb our flesh was all the same color, did more for the future of Peace than treaties and photographed handshakes.
Long-term, grass-roots Peace keeping cannot be achieved with blue helmets and rifles. This is not to say that there is no role for this type of involvement, just that it should not be the focus of our goals for Peace. And declaring war on an entire country because of some extremists within its borders will not bring peace either.
My greatest fear now is not of future terrorist attacks - this will be the beginning of anti-terrorist citizen education in the U.S. of the kind I see in London, and will result in procedures to prevent the subversion of civilian resources as tools of war. The shock of this attack has left most every person on the planet with a raised awareness that will help prevent this sort of atrocity in the future.
My greatest fear is that jingoistic retaliation will only worsen the situation, and my hope is that this will bring the world together in peace. Decentralized violence can only be combated with decentralized peace. Calls for arming civilians and ‘nuking’ entire countries will only add to the casualties.
Targeting the symptoms by prohibiting airplanes over urban centers and educating citizens on how to notice and prevent acts of terrorism in their day to day lives is a first step. And destroying the terrorist organizations themselves will only prevent this from happening in the immediate future. Helping people all over the world to see everyone as humans with families and feelings is truly the long-term solution.
I am sure this rings as an ineffectual hippie rant to many. Clearly more immediate short-term solutions need to focus on immediate protection. But in the long term, focus on programs like the Peace Corps really can change the level of consciousness for individuals the world over. And without individuals to support war based on stereotypes, what chance do these wars have? The second and third goals of the Peace Corps are:
‘To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served;
To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.’
Truly these must be the primary goals of any long-term plan for peace. Let today be the beginning of the next great peace, not the next great war.
- - - - - - - -
.
.
.
I don't think I will write anymore for awhile. I feel like I am talking during someone else's funeral. Everything I say ends up feeling like I am using this tragedy as a soap-box.
. . ..
.
.
.
- - - - - - -
My log files show that U.S. military has recently taken an interest in this site. Probably because the phrases ‘Allah,’
‘Muslim’ and ‘American pig-dog’ appeared in the same page. Hopefully they read the entire post to see the context of the words, for it is good to know that some people in the U.S. military might have read that entreaty for peace.
Knowing that I've been watched amid reports of recent carnivore installations at major ISP's, I find that we are caught in a terrible conundrum. While sacrificng a degree of freedom and privacy on the behalf of security may seem initially reasonable, it undermines the very tenets of the society that has been attacked. If the U.S. allows widepread surveillance and imposes limits on freedom in the name of anti-terrorism, have not the terrorists really won the larger fight? Killing all those people is a terrible, terrible atrocity, and if we allow that attack to also kill our civil rights, aren't we playing into the goals of those murderers?
- - - - - - -
Microsoft-bashing and cyber-politico rants still don't feel appropriate. This horror gnaws deeper at me every day. I've heard from all but two of my friends and family in New York, but as the general reality of the situation sinks in, I grow sadder and sadder.
So it was with shock that I saw a sympton of the depths of heartlessness evidenced in some corporations:
Sent to Dean Allen of Textism from Bill Gates' Corbis:
Subject: Images of Attacks Available at Corbis
‘Corbis' Newsroom has images of today's terrorist attacks available for licensing. Corbis Sygma and Corbis Saba photographers in New York and Washington, DC have been at the scenes of these attacks from very early on, capturing the events.’
While many of the world's businesses shut down for the day to show empathy for the victims, Corbis is hard at work licensing images of the death and destruction for us to purchase. Obviously Bill Gates had nothing to do with this actual email, but it is his business, and he must be expected to run it in an ethical manner.
-via Textism
- - - - - - -
As a Peace Corps Worker in Benin, West Africa, I met many Muslims who believed that Americans felt all Muslims were extremists out for blood. Indeed, many Americans do equate ‘Arab’ with extremist, and Islam with terrorism. But Allah is love just as any other religion's God is love. Living and working with people, sharing in their daily lives, we all came to see one another as fellow humans, and no-one I came to know would stand by while others blindly passed stereotypes about the American pig-dog.
I often wondered why the Peace Corps was called the Peace Corps. Truly our mandate was development, education. But now I see how getting the same dirt under our fingernails, how seeing that underneath our skin and garb our flesh was all the same color, did more for the future of Peace than treaties and photographed handshakes.
Long-term, grass-roots Peace keeping cannot be achieved with blue helmets and rifles. This is not to say that there is no role for this type of involvement, just that it should not be the focus of our goals for Peace. And declaring war on an entire country because of some extremists within its borders will not bring peace either.
My greatest fear now is not of future terrorist attacks - this will be the beginning of anti-terrorist citizen education in the U.S. of the kind I see in London, and will result in procedures to prevent the subversion of civilian resources as tools of war. The shock of this attack has left most every person on the planet with a raised awareness that will help prevent this sort of atrocity in the future.
My greatest fear is that jingoistic retaliation will only worsen the situation, and my hope is that this will bring the world together in peace. Decentralized violence can only be combated with decentralized peace. Calls for arming civilians and ‘nuking’ entire countries will only add to the casualties.
Targeting the symptoms by prohibiting airplanes over urban centers and educating citizens on how to notice and prevent acts of terrorism in their day to day lives is a first step. And destroying the terrorist organizations themselves will only prevent this from happening in the immediate future. Helping people all over the world to see everyone as humans with families and feelings is truly the long-term solution.
I am sure this rings as an ineffectual hippie rant to many. Clearly more immediate short-term solutions need to focus on immediate protection. But in the long term, focus on programs like the Peace Corps really can change the level of consciousness for individuals the world over. And without individuals to support war based on stereotypes, what chance do these wars have? The second and third goals of the Peace Corps are:
‘To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served;
To help promote a better understanding of other peoples on the part of Americans.’
Truly these must be the primary goals of any long-term plan for peace. Let today be the beginning of the next great peace, not the next great war.
- - - - - - - -
Hard to rant about web politics today, so I'll save it. The big news corps are clogged, so the independent web is picking up the slack.
I doubt I even have to mention what I am talking about.
- - - - - - - -
How ICANN Policy Is Made (II)
‘In a watershed moment in Internet history, ICANN declared this week that the ICANN staff can re-assign the .au ccTLD at will, without a finding of misconduct, without a public comment process, and despite the opposition of the incumbent ccTLD manager.’- - - - - - - -
politechbot.com: Security Systems Standards and Certification Act
‘Sec. 101: Prohibition of Certain Devices
‘(a) In General -- It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 104...’
Why can't this world be surreal in the brightly colored, frank sinatra/napalm way? Why does it have to be surreal in the Orwellian Brazil way? This cannot be true. But then again, the U.S. is the country that fines its citizens for visiting Cuba, so the US notion of freedom can get quite twisted when alterior motives come into the picture.
Well, if it actually makes it into law, this will be more fodder for the new genre of ‘legal art.’ But it'll never get voted in. Let's make sure of that. Some great links and views on doing that here
- - - - - - - -
[free-sklyarov] more PDF arrests?
It seems that in Germany the police obtained a search warrant to raid the house of a man accused of sharing a "cracked" .pdf file.
Here's a google translation of the article. (note: reading this is like chewing rocks with your brain matter)
- - - - - - - -
Back from Cornwall and this in my inbox:
the Sovereign Society of Atlantys‘We recognize the Declaration
of the Independence of Cyberspace as declared by
John Perry Barlow on February 8th, 1996 AD and as such have chosen to form the sovereign society of Atlantys within its space. ’
Realizing the dreams of true autonomy of Barlow and Thoreau through the Internet is not a new idea, but that's why it is all the more heartening. The dotcom pimple puffed and popped, and the same old Internet ideals that were there before the pustule are as strong as ever.
Or so I thought as I read the Declaration and Netizenship sections. But pretty soon this place started to seem more like exploiting the Internet to make money that realizing inalienable rights via the Internet.
Today, when someone says ‘laissez-faire capitalism’ I hear ‘unchecked corporate power.’
- - - - - - - -
Nice article about Dmitri Skylarov at FT, of all places. They zero in on an important point that I mentioned in another context earlier today: ‘is the new law right to target the tool rather than the user?’
- via free sklyarov
- - - - - - - -
Electronic Literature DirectoryAlthough Hypertext Fiction sounds dreamy, it's really a slightly more intelligent version of those choose your own adventure books we read in grade school.
To swim with the current, turn to page 25.
To swim across the river, turn to page 99.
To be fair, much of the work goes beyond that, with dynamic poetry and algorithmic text generation, and the ones that are just choose your own adventures are often very well written. - - - - - - - -
Internet Requests for Comments (RFC)
This site, from the Ohio State University, is a jumping point for definitions to the protocols and policies of the Internet. Admittedly, a lot of the definitions are austere and implaccable, but it's still a great start to learning all the nitty gritty of how this thing really works.
- - - - - - - -
OptOut -- Packet Sniffing Details and Resources
Resources on packetsniffing that don't assume you know how a 100Base-T network hub works. And, in related resources:
How Carnivore Works. carnivore, if you don't know, is the United States cyber-spy, a sniffer in its own right.
- - - - - - - -
<nettime> your grabbing of neoism.orgOh la la! But quelle timing. I'd just run a marathon session discovering neoism this past weekend, and now that wonderful habitat for Monty Cantsin has been e-squatted!
‘Dear Mr. Whiting from Buildable Ltd.,
‘we just realized that our registration of neoism.org, a domain which we held since 1995, expired a week ago and that you registered the domain in turn.’
Send polite emails to webmaster@buildable.com to encourage him, nicely, to give that domain back, or at least do something neoish with it.
- - - - - - -
US Justice Department will not seek breakup of Microsoft
‘WASHINGTON, D.C. The Department of Justice's Antitrust Division today advised Microsoft that it will not seek a break-up of the company in remand proceedings before the U.S. District Court. It also informed the company that it does not intend to pursue further proceedings on the tying count of the original complaint. The Department said it is taking these steps in an effort to obtain prompt, effective and certain relief for consumers.’
During the election, I remember joking that if Bush were elected president, the first things he'd do is bomb Iraq, reignite Star Wars, and let Microsoft off the hook.
I don't know how much Bush actually has to do with any of these situations, but my silliest nightmare of what would happen have all come true, and worse. How on earth can we possibly survive four years of this?
- - - - - - - -
Toscani shakes things up at Ars Electronica
‘Asked for years to come to Europe's most prestigious digital arts festival, Toscani finally agreed -- and blasted the whole idea of digital art, suggesting that Ars Electronica might be better off without electricity.
‘"Then you wouldn't do so much crap, so much garbage," he said
‘Toscani, 69, said he was "dubious" about the interaction of art and technology and warned his audience of several hundred against settling for easy choices.’
I must say he's got a good point. I used to paint, But it was too hard. Standing there, dripping in my friggin' oils, angry as hell at that canvas as my paint sloshed here and there. Most of my work has dents in it from stabbing the canvas with the pointy side of my brush. Occasionally, the end result would be something fulfilling, but the process itself was arduous. And the frustration of knowing when to stop!
Enter metalwork, art welding. Now, even when the end result was a literal piece of garbage, the process was enjoyable. Who cares if I just spent three days on a hunk of crap. I was setting fire to metal! Perhaps because of that lack of pain, I consider my metalwork to be in the doodle category.
And all along I doodled on my computer too, but never really considered it a "real" artist's tool. To be perfectly frank, in my hands at least, I still don't. It was an easier choice. I seem to be more talented at the computer than I am with the brush. Or maybe that's just because since the computer is so easy to approach there is so much more mediocrity in the field. People seem more willing to call themselves ‘artists’ on the computer than with more traditional art forms.
And I'm all for an expanded definition of art, but I still think talent of some sort is a prerequisite.
Wow! That was quite a lot of drivel! And tangential too! I think I need to redesign this site. If I'm going to run on like that, I can't expect it to be read in this tiny little window...
- via ditherati
- - - - - - - -
Consumer Privacy—A Free Choice Approach‘As Congressional leaders return to Washington this week, PRI released a new study today that warns that much of the privacy legislation pending in Congress and state legislatures nationwide will harm, rather than help, consumers. ’
- via Declan's polite chbot
- - - - - - - -
The first make world festival ØYES
border=Ø location=YES
‘"make world" is a unix command used to completely update an operating system. It's designed to integrate the latest developments without shutting down the computer. Typing "make world" in the command line rebuilds and renews the source tree. But it's more than that.’
Topics include: "Labor Without Borders", "Open Source and Free Floating" and "Under Global Construction". Lev Manovich will be there. And Geert Lovink! And all the hoity-toity heady netellectuals.
October 17th to the 22nd in Munich.-via Phil Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service
- - - - - - - -
ART.TELEPORTACIA: Location="Yes"
Looks, it's just links to net.art sites. The theme is rather contrived, sites in which the location bar is essential to the meaning of the piece. But the work is goood.I've nothing deeper to say about it. Sometimes a fella just wants to post links.- - - - - - - -
Long distance learning and melodrama at the TeleLearning Conference 2001
‘A new medium of representation has come into human hands only a few times in history. It holds the potential to change what we can know about the world – to alter not just the form of education but the shape of knowledge itself. We are only in the early stages of using the new digital medium to expand our ability to capture, transmit, and master complex information. This talk will examine the core properties of the new medium: its procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial qualities, and look at exemplary projects that exploit these potentials, including simulations, games, archives, and virtual environments. What do each of these modalities contribute to our understanding of knowledge domains and to our changing notions of the learning process? How can we speed up the process of innovation? How can we judge success in a world in which our goals for learning may change as our methods change?’
- - - - - - - -
It's a mad, mad world out there on the Net
‘LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - It's the home of Hot Skating Grandma, Tool Pig, Sirsneezealot, the Rare Person Who Nibbles Glass Cups and a cast of thousands of crackpots, geeks and crazies.
‘Welcome to the Internet, the cyberspace free-for-all once dubbed the information superhighway and now the world's biggest and zaniest Open Mike Night.’
Ahh, 'tis nice to see mainstream articles focusing on the fact that ‘normal’ people still see the web as a rich medium for all our ridiculous non money-making ventures.
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A thought on markup habits in blogs: In the previous post, I used bold and italics to emphasise certain terms within the body text , considered a no-no in hard-core futurist typographical circles for print.
Yet it seems entirely appropriate on the web, especially for blogs. I'd put forth that this is because blogs are close kins to speech, so we seek to emphasise our text in the same way we emphasise our speech. The tone of blogs is often conversational, as is the tone of many articles written specifically for the web in general. (specifically in general?..)
As we seek to define where the history of design in print helps and hinders our approach to design for screen, perhaps these cues from verbal communication can help us.
<caveat>
I'm not saying that italic and bold is impermissable in copy for print, just that I find more italic and bold in web text than print.
</caveat>
A somewhat related tangent: text markup for blind people. Think we'll get to a stage where we have default text styling to represent speech emphasis visually, beyond the bold, italic, ALL CAPS and, in a way, :) :0 :+ :/? Subtleties like PITCH BASE, BREAK LEVEL and RATE SPEED represented typographically on the web?
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At redistribute, we've got hactivist.com : where technology and anarchy fuck revelling in reverse engineering the gameboy and Mark Amerika reverse engineering the net.artist.
The latter is reminiscent of Alistapart's How to be soopafamous, though as the circle of incestuous net.artists are ever-so-more intellectual than the circle of incestuous web designers, Mark Amerika's piece is much more withe. (is that word?) (do you know what I mean?)
While you are at Alistapart, check out Much ado about smart tags.
Personally, I feel the Microsoft Edits All aspects of the technology far outway the potential benefits of which the author speaks. But I am looking forward to the inevitable hacked subversions of these ‘Smart’ tags.
Just like Microsoft loves to embrace, extend and extinguish, we can embrace and extend in our own way. Or does the DMCA only apply to individuals doing the subversions?
- - - - - - - -
‘WIPOUT, an international organisation consisting of academics, artists, musicians, and other activists, is launching the Intellectual Property Counter Essay Contest.
‘The multi-lingual essay contest has been organised in response to the World Intellectual Property Organisation's (WIPO's) own competition announced earlier this year. The counter contest is intended to challenge the over-protection of intellectual property (IP) which is doing much damage to education, health care, the environment, and economic security for millions around the world.
‘Entrants are being asked to address the same topic that WIPO has posed: WHAT DOES INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY MEAN TO YOU IN YOUR DAILY LIFE? We expect the counter contest essays to be rather more critical than those that WIPO is soliciting.’
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Delhi children make play of the net
Incredibly condescending but still very interesting. This guy installed an Internet-connected computer in the wall of a building facing the street of some New Delhi ghetto. And guess what they discovered, that illiterate street kids are not that stupid after all! These little urchins actually figured out how to surf the Internet!
As condescending as the article is, it is still a intriguing idea, and I hope it catches on elsewhere. A totally unexplained litttle visitor with windows to another kind of world... But is MSN the best introduction?
-via backbeltjones
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Law Prof Cajoles Dmitry AlliesWhat a perfectly-titled article!
‘With the looming indictment of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov providing a timely backdrop about an hour down the road from the Moscone Convention Center, Lessig invoked dramatic parallels to the Civil War. He painted a picture of a country divided between those seeking total control over copyright and those who support the freedom to innovate and share ideas.
‘On the wrong side, Lessig said, are the plantations and "masters" represented by the movie moguls and recording companies. Opposing them were his audience, the open-source programmers and visionaries who built the Internet. ’
Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy on the insides?
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Interesting People (200109): IP: Humorless Comedy Central show
‘Battlebots (think robots mauling each other) is quite a decent show, and it's a shame to see that their lawyers are just as censorhappy as anyone else's. The TV show already owns battlebots.com; now they're gunning for battlebots.org. The .org domain apparently has nothing to do with real-world robots and everything to do with IRC 'bots, a recognizably different species.’
I saw the British version last New Years (there was a TV in the house we stayed at), and the show was a lot of fun. Strange looking robot geeks blinking widely in the spotlights while a busty blond asked vapid questions which they answered with either contorted tech-talk or macho gutturals.
Now we have to boycott the show. How long until the first lawyer gets sued by his client for provoking unrest with inflammatory lawsuits?...
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Don't forget: 7 September 2001 is An International Day of Action Against Video Surveillance
That's this Friday!
Tune in or hook up here- - - - - - - -
US to help thwart China's Web censors‘The United States is planning to finance the spread of new computer technology designed to help Chinese Web surfers dodge their government's efforts to censor the Internet, architects of the plan said yesterday.’
Not so new, actually. They're talking about SafeWeb, software that lets you surf anonymously.
Funny that the US is helping people in China subvert their government's "protection" schemes at the same time they are prosecuting a Russian for thwarting one of their own corporation's "protection" schemes. I'm amazed and delighted that the U.S. government is funding this sort of technology, I just wish they'd handle their own affairs with the same dedication to freedom.
-via free-sklyarov mailing list
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The suicide of Guy Debord
‘Debord's fame also rested on his contention, formulated in his 1967 book The Society Of The Spectacle, that everywhere reality is consistently being replaced by images. These images then become reality. "All that once was directly lived has become mere representation. All real activity has been channelled into the global construction of the spectacle," Debord wrote in 1967.
‘
It depressed him in his later years that this insight had long since ceased to be a revolutionary call to arms but the most accurate, if banal, description of modern life.’
This article is less about Guy Debord than about the extremes people will go to to suppress revolutionary thought.
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EURICOM COLLOQUIUM
E-NETWORKS: ARENAS FOR DEMOCRATIC ENGAGEMENT?
PIRAN, SLOVENIA
()
September 19-23, 2001
‘The European Institute for Communication and Culture (Euricom) is hosting a colloquium concerned with the relation between electronic networks and democracy. The central objective of this seminar is to provide opportunity for theoretically grounded empirical studies to be presented by scholars active in this area in order to collectively consider the present state of knowledge and make proposals for new investigative inroads.’
- - - - - - - -
<-- start weekend postsmu‘The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". ’
From the jargon file, this seems a particularly neoist answer.- - - - - - - -
Monty Cantsin‘The basis of Neoism lies in the idea that anyone can be a particular individual. ’
I remember a favorite past-time of mine in high school was to pretend I thought that someone was someone famous. Preferably someone who looked absolutely nothing like the famous person I supposedly mistook them for. And only with a stanger.
Like once I decided this big brown guy sitting in the driving seat of a limo outside the hospital across from my high school was Wayne Newton. I refused to believe his protests that he was not Wayne Newton, and eventually got an autograph for my mother from him.Carloyn,
Best Wishes,
Wayne Newton- - - - - - - -
culture: ‘Selecting and combining signs, Neoism blatantly affirms culture.’
Funny, I would have sworn this whole Neoist thing would be one of those schools of thought that shied away from calling itself an -ism. And certainly one that eschewed Capitalizing Itself. But, perhaps they are above semantics. yes, I am aware that I am using the word inappropriate to its link, but any excuse to link to something described as Less than a cult, more than a theory of linguistics. will do.- - - - - - - -
<neoist filtering>
continuing from the last post: ‘Recently I realized that the separation between reality and imagination was the result of the rejection of information inherent in the human desire for 'survival'. If the process of consciousness is physical, then every thought is a concrete object which is as real as this text.’
This is exactly the conundrum I got myself caught in one evening in a hotel in Barcelona. I have a tendency to abstract things much further than is at all useful. Beyond psuedo-intellectuallism into absolute inanity. I have realized that there is always another level of abstraction, there is always another layer of surreality in life which we can peel away, like an onion.
That's probably why I like OOP so much.
And I just kept peeling away layers of reality until I started to get rather frightened, and so I decided to agree with myself, "okay, I know this isn't base reality that we are at, but it is far enough from a reality that I am comfortable with, so i'd like to stop now. We can dig deeper later, but I'd like to exist at this level for awhile, okay?"
okay?
OKAY?
</neoist filtering>
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<neoist filtering>
‘Later I realized that the process of living is essentially a process of suspension of disbelief, of rejecting information which is complex or invalidates the system of perception which revealed it. Nothing I have learned subsequently has been as painful or disorienting than this realization realization.’
» » Beyond Distopia: Text and Anti Text
</neoist filtering>
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Upping the Anti-School of Fucked-Up & Away
‘F.U.M.T.U.: Fucked-Up More Than Usual ’
The theme this weekend will be: FILTERING NEOISM.
I'm amazed I hadn't discovered this earlier, so this weekend I will bring you the morsels I uncover about this thing as way of introducing us all into this...‘mind game’..? They are elitist, egalitarian, psuedo-intellectual and utterly ridiculous. I like them very much, and and am thinking this is perhaps what I want to be when I grow up.
Fluxus without the art, perhaps? Or shall I be neoistoned for labelling ‘them’?
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end of weekend posts-->
InstaCase.com
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid name - sounds like something akin to a drive-through marriage service - but a really useful site.
They provide summaries of the decisions of the latest big cases in the U.S. from an informed an unbiased perspective.
‘Instacase.com brings you summaries of the latest decisions as they are released for publication on the internet, which is typically one to two weeks before you read about the case in your local legal newspaper. It is our goal to include in our database the electronic texts from the highest and intermediate appellate courts from each of the 50 states, as well as each of the United States Circuit courts. The advantages of this service are obvious and are provided absolutely free. ’
Plus, while newspapers and their web correlates (sic?) need to slant articles to sell, this place needs to give a fair representation of the case for other lawyers.
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