“venting”
26 posts under this tag.
I feel — numb. Distant. Detached. Separate. Futile. Tepid. Coward. Been on a media breakdownELZR for too many days now—ScrubsWP, NausicaaWP, The Economist, The New York Times, porn, (Ben Shneiderman’s) interface design articles, Wired, (so many) books. Unprecedented amounts of physical exercise sprinkled throughout (bizarre, I know). Much been thought, outcomes uncertain (to put it hopefully).
Only 30 pages into Finite and Infinite GamesAM I think it’s the best book I’ve read. ”Seriousness,” it says, ”is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility. To be serious is to press for a specified conclusion. To be playful is to allow for possibility whatever the cost to oneself.” Been far too serious in my life lately. Too scared.
Stupid death won’t go away. Seems my (maternal) grandfather has lung cancer—most likely metastatic. Brutal prognosis. He’s been staying here at home and I’ve been escaping it all—so far away. So serious.
And yet I’m hopeful now. I can never force myself to post something until I’m hopeful. Until I’ve a plan. Until I’m back. (Too scary otherwise.)
Gonna play.
Almost got myself killed driving—too distracted—to the worst theater performance of my life. Saw a girlfriend’s mean true colors. Lost my car keys, panicked, found them later in my own satchel. Back home, found the little brother of one of my high school’s closest friends died tonight. Ran at 2AM to the wake, dazed, crashed into the neighbour’s pickup. So many old friends there, so adult now. And my friend impossibly tall, so beautiful, so sad—his little bro killed himself.
As much as I truly hate domain hoarding when I’m out there looking for a spiffy domain to my latest webapp, I confess compulsive domain buying is one of my guilty pleasures1. I’m hoarding, I know, but perhaps my scale will redeem me. Those bastards—you know who you are—who hoard (“park”) thousands of domains, financing the whole murky enterprise by filling their spoils with semantically-related ads disguised as directories… well, may they be strangled to a slow, painful death by his noodly appendage.
My two most recent acquisitions are ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com.
The first domain is a phrase that has haunted me since I first read it at a local exposition2 (thanks to Andrea for telling me about it) of the work of Cultural-Revolution China’s Li ZhenshengWP. A photoreporter of the main newspaper in China’s far Northeast during China’s Mao mire, Li kept negatives of his work against orders and they may be the best remaining record of the horror. Andrew Stuttaford wrote a harrowing review of Li’s Red-Color News SoldierAM and he didn’t escape the phrase either:
More typical, and more tragic, was Wu Bingyuan, a technician accused of counterrevolutionary activities (a pamphlet). Li recalls that when Wu heard his sentence, death, “he looked into the sky and murmured, “this world is too dark”; then he closed his eyes and never in this life reopened them.” The photographs show Wu being paraded through the streets of the city. Later, shackled and bound, he’s pictured at his place of execution. His eyes are still shut. We see him kneeling, back turned to the firing squad. His eyes are still shut. The final image is of Wu’s corpse. His eyes are still shut.
I want to do something at thisworldistoodark.com that honors Wu’s memory but I still don’t know what. What I do know is that the phrase is forever carved into my memory.
 The other domain, nellodee.com, is thankfully from the opposite end of human possibilites. Nellodee is the full version of Nell, the name of the protagonist of Neal Stephenson’s excellent Diamond AgeAM, a toddler from the future slums that chances on a state-of-the-art learning machine. This book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, the book-within-the-book, is every self-learner’s wet dream: endlessly interactive, infinitely patient, all-knowing, self-adapting, story-driven, fractal (the basic outline of the book’s story is presented at the very beginning, from then on you advance the story by zooming in on any particular fragment of it, the fragment develops into a full-fledged story, and on it goes). It has left me so deeply impressed that I have to do my share to bring it eventually to life. Toki Pona seems like the perfect subject to try my clumsy hand at the Primer concept with a simple web-app—it’s a small, simple, and enjoyable subject, and I’m already sort of an expert in it. We’ll see.
So why am I telling you all this? To assuage my conscience. You see, perhaps I dawdle for years before actually implementing any of the above ideas and so I’ve configured both ThisWorldIsTooDark.com and Nellodee.com to redirect here, to this very post, in the meantime. If you are doing (really doing, not pie-in-the-sky woulda doing) something really cool, are missing a good domain, and either of those two would be a great choice for your project, I’d be glad to give them to you. Gratis. Full-ownership. With my best wishes.
Back when I was a serious download freak, always looking for that little app that’d make it all right, Nonags was one of my favorite haunts. They listed only freeware and well-behaved, no-nags shareware. The design was accordingly simple and unobtrusive (though quirky). How weird then that now when trying to download something you’re taken to one of those infamous “Your-download-should-start-automatically” pages, full of Google ads that don’t stand a chance of being remotely relevant (relevant to what? the “invitation” to join Nonag plus?). Worst, the cheapest, lowliest possible kind of popup (party poker! your computer is at risk!) creeps underhandedly (that is, hides beneath your current window).
It would be ironic, were it not sad.
OK, pardon the profanity. I had been following the Net “Neutrality” argument from a perplexed distance for some time (as I’ve chronicled about before) but this month’s Scientific American editorial on the subject and its disgusting rhetoric is just too damn much. Perverting George Orwell’s masterpiece on the dangers of imposing equality, Animal FarmWP, so as to defend that very same imposition is off-limits, it’s too low, it’s too devious. It’s repulsive. Yuck.
There are several more gems sprinkled throughout. Here’s another one:
A system for prioritizing data traffic might well be necessary someday, yet one might hope that it would be based on the needs of the transmissions rather than the deal making and caprices of the cable owners.
Of course, forget the silly “caprices” and blind moneylust of the pesky owners of the cable themselves. Who could know better about the cable business and its needs than casual passersby like ourselves?
To respond in kind, I propose a different appropriation of George Orwell, this one from his other anti-totalitarianism classic, 1984WP:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
NET INTERVENTION IS NET NEUTRALITY
One good thing came out of that editorial though, I found out about Hands Off The Internet, a sane organization against government intervention on the net. Pay them a visit.
I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by…
— Douglas Adams WP
Oh boy, can you hear the whoosh yet again? For the first deadline (August 5) my excuse was mostly several huge, polished posts (1, 2, 3) that I just started pouring out possessedly one afternoon after another. For the second deadline (August 12—yesterday!), well, no excuse other than that I’m in thrall with Domburi, and despite sleepless nights (day? night? they’ve lost all meaning to me), I’m happily obsessing with details and trying all sorts of innovative things. I’ve reached a strange state of scripting satori: I’m writing HTML through Javascript like no one has before. I swear it’s so weird and powerful that in a way it’s funny. It’s big stuff.
So yes, it’s better to think of my previous Road Map as broad guidelines for what’s to come. Just trust me, when Domburi’s finally out (August 31), it’ll be heart-breakingly beautiful. Till then and thanks for keeping in touch.
It’s early morning and it rains droplets and brisk light outside—I’m happy.
Lorelai: Come on!
Rory: Wait. Come on where?
L: Inside.
R: We can’t go inside.
L: Why? Is there a force field or something around the place?
R: This is Harvard.
L: I know.
R: This. Is. Haaarvard.
L: I. Knooow.
R: You can’t just go inside. You need a guide.
L: I’ll be your guide.
R: What do you know about Harvard?
L: I know this: Look. There is Harvard.
R: Mooom…
L: Hey, don’t you want to see it? Huh? The place where you be living and studying and developing very naive but pretentious worldviews that will come crashing down the minute you graduate.
R: Yeah, I do…
Gilmore Girls, The Road Trip to Harvard
Out of college but still smack in the very-naive-but-pretentious-worldviews phase.
Grr… I hate looking for new domain names. Everything’s already taken and when it’s not, it’s because some arcane country code top level domain rules that won’t let you get it.
Case in point: my quest for a shorter domain for Imagery (elzr.com/imagery seems unfair now that it receives far, far more visits than this very blog). Sean was kind (and fast) enough the other day to grab imgry.com and imag3ry.com but, I don’t know, they are simply not that satisfying. So my first stab at it was trying to pull a ma.gnolia.com, to no avail (magery.com, agery.com, gery.com, ery.com, ery.com—all taken). Then I tried a del.icio.us, again to no avail (it turns out there’s no .ry code and .ru would have been nice but image.ru, which sounds pleasantly japanesy to me, is already taken). And then it hit me, straight from high above I swear: ima.ge/ry! It was free, it was cool, it was weird: my quest was over—it should have been over. But it turns out the damn .ge is only available to Georgian residents! Grr…
On a related domain pet-peeving note: since 1997 you can’t buy a something.mx domain (you have to get a second-level domain, like .com.mx, .gob.mx, etc). Why? Go figure. I can buy something.us (U.S.), something.am (Armenia), or something.tw (Taiwan) but not the one from my country. Grr…
Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.
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