2006
371 posts under this date.
In which I confess to be reading a blog in its entirety, reminisce about one of the first blogs I read, and use “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” as a tool to understand what’s so great about blogs.
I’m a fan of DHH (that’s David Heinemeier Hansson, but since no one, not me for sure, can type his name correctly, he’s usually called DHH). He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a very smart programmer, and an even smarter manager. How can you not like someone with this in his about page?
I believe in change, ignorance (my own), love, and the power of motivation.
Anyway, out of a childish infatuation with his persona I’ve taken upon myself to read his blog, Loud Thinking, back to front, all 4 years of it. I’ve just read the first 24 posts from July 2001, and it has been a lot of fun.
For one thing, I feel like a scholar, tracing all the antecedents that lead to someone’s achievements, savoring the obscure details, going straight to the source, nosing around on the archives. It’s fascinating to see his development.
It also feels like if I were talking to his ghost of days gone by. Blogs are truly a new state of being (see the next post for more of that techno-boosterism). What’s surprising is how similar that ghost is to myself. How he also struggled with procrastination, also likes the same music that I like, also learned VIM, also loves to argue, also fears growing old, also has sleep disorders, also likes to pontificate once in a while.
Of course, there are also lots of differences. But I knew that already. What is amazing is how much you can have in common with someone apparently so different. One of the first bloggers I read—back in the day when reading a blog was something weird and shameful (”You read people’s diaries? What for?”)—put e.e.cummings’ Anyone lived in a pretty how town in her about page, and interpreted it as a love story between “anyone” and “noone” (here’s an interpretation in that vein). What she found tragic was how oblivious the townsfolk were to their love and grief:
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
So what she treasured in blogs (this is all from memory, I’ve never been able to find her blog again) was their ability to let you see behind “anyone” and “noone”. They put you in contact with people you’d probably never even meet, let alone talk to, and show you that, in the end, they’re not so different from yourself—they also struggle, love, fear, and fail, just like you do.
My favorite from those 24 first posts? Refusing to let an identity mask run my life, hands down.
Since Javascript 1.2 and later there has been a cool and very powerful literal syntax for functions:
var sum = function(x, y) {return x+y}
A couple of weeks ago I found an interesting use of this syntax. Missing Ruby’s wonderful each function, I decided to implement something similar in JS, and, after some experimentation, ended up with this:
function each(a, f) { for(var i=0, l=a.length; i<l; i++) f(a[i]) };
The function syntax comes in handy when you use this each:
each([1, 2, 3, 4, 5], function(e) { alert(e) });
It may not be as satisfying as Ruby’s each, but it’s quite useful.
In which a philosophical quote provides the sparkle for some more talking on philosophical things like the self and civilization.
It is a time when, even if nets were to guide all consciousness that had been converted to photons and electrons towards coalescing, standalone individuals have not yet been converted into data to the extent that they can form unique components of a larger complex.
That’s the chilling intro to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Honestly, when I first read it I thought it was mere Engrish, but now that I’ve come to terms with its form (I’m even starting to like it), I can’t get its content out of my head. It’s just so powerful.
It makes you think of civilization as one long gradient towards ever larger complexes. A very interesting lens with which to revisit many important events and inventions: family, clans, money, speaking, writing, printing, law, contracts, corporations, science, the net, IP, blogs, wiki, mailing lists, email, IM, whatnot.
And it reminds me a lot of a favorite essay of mine—one I stumbled across a few years ago in wonderful serendipity: Erosion of the Essential Self. In it, it is argued that our sense of self is being made increasingly obsolete by technology, and that this may not necessarily be a bad thing. One of the interesting points it makes is that our sense of self itself is probably a byproduct of written culture: “In ongoing, face-to-face conversation, we are little concerned with the mind behind the words; meaning is shaped before us in the course of the interchange. However, with the emergence of printed text, important questions were created about the ‘author’s meaning.’” It’s one of those essays that simply becomes a part of you afterwards, something like this:
I was amazed and impressed by the brilliance of GEB when I first read it, but it didn’t change my life. However over the years I kept finding myself returning to its insights, and each time I would arrive at them at a deeper level. Now I find them my own thoughts, and I realize I now see the world through a similar lens.
In which in response to a question it is explained, in Spanish, why this blog is written (mostly) in English (and not in Spanish).
Entiendo y supongo que comparto esa como admiración por lo divertido que puede ser escribir en inglés, pero acaso no es posible hacer lo mismo con el español?
Claro que es posible, pero, al menos para mi, es mas dificil. Tu afirmas tacitamente que lo que importa es el talento, no el idioma, y eso es muy cierto. Estoy seguro de que toda la jerga gringa que nos invade—jerga tecnologica, cientifica, social, y artistica—podria haberse desarrollado perfectamente en Español, en Japones, en Hebreo, o, quizas, en toki pona. Pero se desarrollo en Ingles! Y es precisamente por que el idioma no es lo que importa, sino sus hablantes y la suma de sus talentos y creatividad linguistica1, que el Ingles es actualmente la lengua. A principios de nuestro siglo no hay esfera mas importante, mas efervescente, ni mas creativa que la angloesferaWP (que para mi abarca todos los hablantes del Ingles, sin importar si lo aprendieron, quizas a regañadientes, como segunda lengua). No es malinchismo, es la verdad.
Precisamente, un buen ejemplo en Español de a que me refiero con jerga es “malinchismo”. Es una palabra curiosa, llena de significado y matices para cualquier mexicano (quizas tambien para cualquier latinoamericano), pero es muy dificil de traducir a otros idiomas por ser un fenomeno cultural (tristemente) muy nuestro. La tecnologia, la ciencia, y el arte son hoy en dia, en enorme medida, fenomenos de la angloesfera (como lo fueron en su tiempo del Aleman, del Frances, del Latin, del Griego, del Sumerio, del…).
O aqui va otro ejemplo, mas alentador: como dices “trova” en ingles? No puedes. Te ves forzado a escribir trova entre comillas y explicar atropelladamente que es la trova dentro de la hispanoesfera (o simplemente confiar que tu escucha este familiarizado con ella).
Por supuesto, este tipo de palabras y conceptos no son propiedad exclusiva de la esfera que las creo. Eventualmente, otras esferas las asimilan y llegan a su vez a derivar nuevas palabras y conceptos—rocanrol es ya una palabra hispana, y mas aun rocanrolero (como dices “rocanrolero yo soy” en ingles?). La pega aqui es ese “eventualmente”. ( In the long run we’re all dead, remember?)
Es por eso que me faltan palabras en Español para hablar sobre lo que yo quiero hablar—mi idioma no las sabe todavia. Me faltan palabras y me faltan interlocutores—la gente con la que quiero hablar, abrumaduramente habla ingles (muchas veces como segundo idioma, claro, pero aun asi). Le he dado pues varias vueltas al asunto y, en este momento, la conversacion que me interesa, en la que quiero participar directamente, es la de la angloesfera2. Que cada quien elija, libremente, la suya.
Please! Refrain from speaking or any sort of communication that could ease the time. Limit yourself to look stupidly astray and ignore the fact that you are sharing space and time with other fellow human beings.
Time to say goodbye to my incipient vegetarianism. Who am I kidding? I’m a man of the flesh.
In which to much rejoicing of the masses, the one true catch-metaphor for blogs is finally unveiled.
Last time a friend asked me what a blog was, I blabbered and gesticulated madly for a long while, only to cap it off, desperate, with the safe “they’re online diaries”. As it often happens, I ended up saying exactly the opposite of what I believe. I don’t think blogs are mere online diaries. Those are a sub-genre, to be sure, but blogs are much more, and it is misleading, stifling, and plain false, to have that as their only metaphor (isn’t it overstretching to call this very blog post you’re now reading a journal entry?).
So that no one finds himself forced to betray his better knowledge again, I’ve tried to find a metaphor that outcharms the prevailing one—one that’s true and yet as simple and catchy. I think I’ve found it: Blogs are open letters.
Blogs are open letters. Compilations of written communications addressed to whoever may want to read them1. The title of a blog post, the letter, is in fact its address, crafted to route the epistle to its many recipients (though of course Google, the post master, uses far more clever ways to deliver it). A good dose of current happenings goes in these letters, of course, but there’s much, much else: recommendations, reviews, analysis, reflections, advice, criticism, self-promotion, narrative, essays, rants, howtos, explanations, interpretations, confessions, j’accuses, press releases, calumnies, lies, exaggerations, gossip, sobs—anything that would go on a letter.
So now you know. Blogs are open letters. Spread the word (or challenge it in the comments).
Movie Director: How was it?
Major Motoko Kusanagi: I certainly wouldn’t say it was a bad movie.
But no matter what kind of entertainment it is… it should be temporary. With no beginning or ending, the audience is bewitched into not letting go of a movie like this.
I don’t think there’s anything wonderful about that. In fact, it’s rather harmful.
Director: Oh, harsh. You’re trying to say that we should return to reality, right?
Major: That’s right.
Director: There are people in this audience who have unhappy things waiting for them if they return. If you take away the audience’s dreams, will you also take on their responsibilities?
Major: No, I won’t. Dreams only have meaning because we struggle in the waking world. Just projecting yourself into other people’s dreams is the same as being dead.
Director: A realist, eh?
Major: If you call someone who runs away from reality a romantic.
Director: Such a strong girl. Call me when you’ve made your beliefs reality. We’ll come out of this theater when that time comes.
I don’t think it needs much context but this conversation takes place inside some sort of virtual reality where dozens of people are voluntary trapped watching an endless film. A favorite quote of mine. I had to transcribe it myself because it’s nowhere to be found around the web. Weird, that.
Bob represents the domestication of the personal computer, in the pejorative sense of the word, turning the miraculous shape-shifting capacities of these machines into a dulled repetition of everyday, household reality.
The real magic of graphic computers derives from the fact that they’re not tied to the old, analog world of objects. They can mimic much of that world of course, but they’re also capable of adopting new identities and performing new tasks that have no real-world equivalent whatsoever. People who get hooked on computers get hooked for this reason. They don’t become high-tech junkies because their machines remind them of their Rolodexes; they’re junkies because their machines do things they never thought possible. Interface design should reflect this newness, this range of possibility.
Amen.
Good ole Tetris is a wonderful example of those possibilities, of that unreality, and so is Photoshop. For a more recent, fascinating example look no further than the Namekuji game (but be warned, by clicking this link you therewith relinquish the next couple of hours).
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