2006

I’ll be the first to acknowledge its silliness but who cares, I’m just wowed. I finally downloaded the entire 50GB 6-seasons 127-episode Gilmore Girls^WP series. Frankly, when I begun this I was not (yet) a gilmore-zealot, my point in downloading it was rather to test the limits of my current technology—and, of course, to smugly marvel at how much these limits have receded. I remember when 5mb made for a humongous download. It was something akin to those news one often hears about some university or other breaking some telecommunication’s limit or other (Gazillion Number of Terabytes Per Second Achieved at Gung Ho University). I was merely exploring the digital frontier of the amateurishly possible.

But that was then. I only just watched the first season (~20 hours) with my sisters and loved it. I’m a fan. The “intricate, extremely fast-paced dialogue, with numerous modern pop culture references, along with many other references to politics and high culture.”^WP was the initial hook for me but the more I immersed myself into the series the more I was surprised. The show is really girly, really, really different to me, to my everyday experience, to what I’ve lived. And yet I really like it. I think I would be one happy girl (or daughter or mom)—and it’s starting to rub off on me. I’m starting to talk fast and witty (that was a joke), empathy has gone thru the roof, I understand so much more why my mother acts like she does sometimes, Rory has rekindled my geek, bookworm, naive-I-want-to-learn-everything pride, and last night I caught myself speaking like Lorelai. It’s a shame isn’t it? Life’s so short and we’re so fixed in our roles.

And this train of thought has led me to ponder just to what extent we (as in we) are social constructions. It’s a cliche that Shakespeare invented the modern introspecting human and I recently read some lines

that, bizarre though they felt at the moment, are looking truer with every minute. I wonder, to the chagrin of some feminists I know, up to what extent is gender a social construction?

You can laugh (and I do), but I feel much more feminine and talkative since I watched GGs, and years of Friends have deeply influenced who I am and how I want to live, and I just read about this guy who thinks that Seinfield has simply made him a funnier person. Maybe, and this is a big maybe, one part of the holding power of TV in particular, and fiction in general, is that it allows us some degree of flexibility in choosing what constructions we want our selves to be molded with. Granted, usually we simply reinforce our worn ways, but at times, like this one, there are nice surprises.

The famous polyfacetic wit and good friend of mind, Adolfo, has finally decided to keep the letters flowing in an unsurprisingly-Seinfield-inspired Spanish blog: The Timeless Art of Seduction.

Good news indeed.

There is now such a thing as a teen buzz repeller that doubles up as an adult-proof ringtone. What a droll world to live in. I’m happy today.

(via The Timeless Art of Seduction)

Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.

My grandfather, Luis, is going to be 84 tomorrow (today, actually) and the whole family is hectic preparing him a humongous birthday. We, my sisters and I, are in charge of the digital accouterments and since I’d been wanting to create a photo mosaic for a while, I decided to give it a try today. What ensued baffled me.

I googled photo mosaic and went to the very first result, a 2004 engadget tutorial. The tutorial was very clear and to the point, and I donwloaded the freeware featured in it: AndreaMosaic. The thing was simple, unpretentious and surprisingly intuitive. Some minutes later I was off churning mosaics away and trying the different configurations.

It still took me the better part of the day to finish (with zam distractions) and get the thing 1.27×140m printed but, come on, I even feel ashamed of how little work I actually did. I’m going to be the one with the most impressive, flashy thing in the party and all the time I’ll just be thinking how disproportionate was my effort to the result.

Think about it for a second, a clueless guy in the middle of Mexico is able to churn out in a couple of hours (for something like 50 bucks) a graphical confection that would have floored anyone 50 years ago, that would have been nigh priceless a 100 years ago, and that would have gotten him burned at the stake earlier than that.

I’m unsettled and, frankly, the fact that it isn’t unsettling to anyone else is all the more disturbing to me (because that only hints at how fast this thing I did has already become obsolete). We’re smack in the middle of an art singularity of sorts.

There have been many boy-is-this-comic-good moments amid my reading of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman^WP: the convention of serial killers (with panels, keynote speakers, chit chat—the whole shebang); the 100-year meetings of Dream and Hob (a mortal who simply doesn’t believe in death; “death’s a mug’s game” were his words); the utterly disturbing cafeteria slaughter; the prisoner muse Calliope (to draw inspiration from her, one has to, “naturally”, rape her)... but the very first one was Dream’s stand-up-comedy-esque fight in hell for his helmet:

to blackbox could be to reify thru interface. To suggest or implement a conceptualization thru interface. A basic strategy for synthetizing reality, it stems from an active rewriting of the famous duck test: “If I make this look like a duck, and quack like a duck, I may as well be able to conceptualize it as a duck”. The conscious, deliberate, “I make” part is crucial; to blackbox is not just to simply conceptualize, is to wilfully conceptualize something by painting an interface on it.

(Contrived) Usage Examples:

1. “In modern programming, we blackbox our way out of complexity thru functions, objects, aspects, macros, and the like.”
2. “Money is our society’s blackboxing of wealth, that is, of ‘what people want.’ We ought to remember it when trying to ‘make’ money.”
3. “With the magic of silicone, you too can blackbox yourself a pair of massive pointy hooters!”
4. “At this point, perhaps a better title for this essay is probably ‘An easy way to blackbox your own file-extension.”
5. “The Kuratowski definition of an ordered pair as {{a},{a,b}} is pure blackboxing.”
6. “In defining the class PlanePoint, from the stored attributes xPos and yPos you can (and probably should) blackbox Distance from them thru the distance formula.”
7. “Let’s wrap these almost-expired candies with this cute cellopane bag and this lace bow, and blackbox them into a ‘Super Saving Kit’.”
8. “I’m dying for someone to blackbox reputation, population, authority—the whole memetic shebang—thru some kind of social software.”
9. “Don’t you find it amazing how blackboxing lanes and pedestrian crossings on the street thru mere painting can be so useful?”
10. “Let’s blackbox operating systems away thru browsers!”

The word comes, of course, from the technical meaning of blackbox: “a device or system or object when it is viewed primarily in terms of its input and output characteristics.”

• 382: emotional dettachment
  
• 481: “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future” (personal favorite)
  
• 888: “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”
  
• 3: the desire to want to dial the the Penfield mood organ (interestingly, this emotion has a very low number, suggesting it’s a basic, heavily-relied-upon one)
  
• 594: “pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”
  

• unknown 1: “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job”
  
• unknown 2: “ecstatic sexual bliss”
  
• unknown 3: “despair”
  
• unknown 4: “businesslike professional attitude”
  
• unknown 5: “self-accusatory depression”
  

The Penfield mood organ is a wonderfully original invention but what’s even most admirable is the masterful introduction to it Philip Dick pulls off: those 1,300 words are dense and microcapsuled enough to be able to stand alone as a great short story.