“inspiration”
87 posts under this tag.
This blog had been gone for quite a while, a while in which I never stopped writing, it’s just that I saved it to a local text file. You see, I wanted (and want) something quite different from this blog than what it is now and I was experimenting with new formats. I was close to figuring out what I wanted but then this whole wonderful Imagery media blitz got a hold of me and I’m focusing all my energies on it. So the new blog will be another while coming and I thought that it was pointless (and rude of my part) to not publish anything in the mean time.
Most of what I’ve been doing this past month or so has been reading my ass off. Oh boy, have I good taste or what:
And where does the newborn go from here?
The net is vast and infinite.
Ghost in the Shell
2,151 persons visited Imagery 2 days ago, 6,790 visited yesterday, 3,655 have visited it today (as of this very moment). It made it to the del.icio.us homepage. It made it to LifeHacker. Blogs in 22 languages have talked about it.
It’s been overwhelming. I’m compulsively refreshing my stat counter every 20 seconds. I feel so tiny, so standalone everytime it hits me that as I go to the bathroom 30 more people, somewhere in the world, have tried the website. But that the world is a weird, humongous place you knew, what has baffled me as I obsessively researched where everyone was coming from was what a surreal, boundless nonplace the web is. These last two days have shown me a dazzling array of bizarre organisms—mashups, filters, feeds, composites, parasites, symbiots, recomposites, bots, leeches, scams, automators—that thrive on the web, underneath the hood.
Oh, and one more thing: the sheer, brutal, speed of it all. It took two days and one email to Emily Chang (Thanks Sean!) to go from a pretty much forgotten website to this.
The present’s baffling.
As an exercise in vanity, here’s some compulsively gathered, up-to-the-minute updated, biased media coverage of the website (mostly blogs):
He is my namesake and in many other ways my electronic soulmate but nothing that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written has left a deeper impression in me than his goodbye to his death brother I read this morning.
We shall, indeed, have to work faster (and smarter).
Truth be told, I usually find Jaron Lanier obnoxious, unconvincing, and mushy. His obsession to fancy himself the last bastion of humanism amid the rabid, materialistic techno-geeks bores me, and, though he’s a virtual reality pioneer, I’d never found any of his ideas particularly visionary. Until yesterday.
I was teetering (with excitement) when I read his answer to Edge’s 2005 question: What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?:
My belief is that the potential for expanded communication between people far exceeds the potential both of language as we think of it (the stuff we say, read and write) and of all the other communication forms we already use.
He goes on to describe what must surely be one of the most mind-blowing ideas I’ve ever read: “post-symbolic communication.” (Yup, I’ve got the weirdest fetish with symbols themselves—which seems to me to be the mother of all fetishes.) Anyway, wow. That sort of thing is precisely what I imagine when I ramble madly about VR to people (Sergio and Beca can attest to that) only to get the same dull, unimpressed answer: “So what? It’s all fake.” (As if they don’t already spend well over half of their lives in media, which is just another name for artificial, fake, realities: the web, IM, TV, movies, books, games, radio, ads…)
But I digress. I think this extract from an interview to Lanier, The giant worm to Saturn (~1000 words), is a great intro to “post-symbolic communications”. Go read it.
The subject of the U.S.-Mexico migration (the biggest in the world, one hears) is everywhere right now. But unfortunately, almost all one always hears is pessimism, fear, nationalism, and prejudice. Most people don’t realize there’s something new and wonderful emerging. It’s a shame one doesn’t hear more often from Richard Rodriguez, a profoundly polemical Mexican-American writer. In his books, his essays, and his interviews he reinvents the concept of being Mexican. He lies about it, of course (he is the first to acknowledge it), but his is a fiction that describes me, his is a fiction I want to believe in.
You’ll have to excuse me but I’ve never felt as a victim of the US, I am American! I’ve been devouring the US all my life! But then again, that’s just weird old me—always suffering from multiple-nationality-disorder, from dislocation (I’m of the web! How could it be otherwise? “My kingdom is not of this world”); perpetually naive, perpetually “falling in love with cultures not my own”, perpetually imbued with the “arrogance” that “the individual is in control of the culture.”
I’ve compiled here a long list of quotations from several of Rodriguez’s interviews and articles. I tried to stick with the topic of migration but I did a lousy job at that, this man is too interesting.
I don’t know what made me cry when I read this brief account by Heberto Castillo some years ago. Perhaps I saw in him—a young, talented, penniless, just-married, idealistic civil engineer—my father, perhaps I saw myself in his unabashed naiveté.
Here’s my hand-typed transcription of the story, which appeared in his 1988 book Si Te Agarran Te Van a Matar:
I really don’t know what led me to spin this whole tale from the vaguest of memories when I read this post but it did. (The teacher, btw, is almost surely Dorothy, my Mexican History teacher… or perhaps that cool Spanish teacher whose name I’m forgetting now.) Parece que tengo futuro como redactor de comerciales de Aplijsa.
I remember a high school teacher used to
tell us a story about a young prince of a faraway kingdom. His father, the king, had gifted him on the day he came of age a fine ring of pure gold with only the engraving “This will pass” on its surface. “You will live through hard times,” said the old king with a sad smile, “when everything around you will seem to fall apart, when you’ll be powerless, when you’ll be hopeless. That is the lot of man.”
“But,” and the monarch looked at his son in the eye as he put the ring on his finger, ”’they will pass’, and that wisdom is my gift to you.” The prince nodded gravely and yet distant, blithely enveloped in the abstractness of youth.
“Wait,” said the king, as his son was leaving his royal chamber, “there’s one more thing. Perhaps the day will come to you, as it came to me, when not even these words will be enough. There’s a hidden message on the back of this ring, therein lies the rest of my wisdom. It shall give you hope, as it gave it to me. You must not read it until then.” And with that, he sent his son away to enjoy his day.
Time passed. The king died a few years later and our prince succeeded him, proving himself a king as noble and wise as his father. He was very successful but he was not without his share of tragedy; the ring was his companion at those times, and indeed it gave him hope when there was none.
But soon after his 40th birthday, terror stroke his kingdom, a plague with no parallel even in legends devoured his entire country. It took her wife and his two children away, and so it did to almost half of his subjects. His kingdom was crumbling, reverting to a state of chaos, and there was generalized despair. His people turned to him for guidance but he found none within himself. But just when he entertained thoughts on his own death he remembered his father’s ring. He took it away slowly and, after some hesitation, read the hidden message. He cried happy tears at the sight of those four letters; he had found his hope.
In clear-cut white letters, the back of the ring read only: “This, too, shall pass.”
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