“web”

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.

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.

Impossible Ideas Before Breakfast

Series Blenders

I’ve been looking for cool art lately (yup, there is a girl :) and I’m happily surprised to find there are lots of great stuff on the web. There are hundreds of web shops of amateur and independent artists out there (here’s one: boygirlsparty). DeviantArt was a first stop, of course; later followed by Etsy, a big place to find craftsy stuff which has some nice things going on and thru which I found Poketo, an artsy store specializing in wallets and apparel, where I finally found the gift (which will be perfect for her, I swear—had I had it custom-made it wouldn’t be this good).

And ogling through artist’s websites I found the perfect gift for, well, me: Io: Art of the Wired. I don’t know, I can simply feel it: this is a great book. Look at the rave reviews and the great art included:

But what really blew me away was Poketo’s flat worldwide shipping rate and Guu Media’s even bolder FREE global shipping. Nothing says one world louder than free shipping anyplace.

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…

I found this out in the Wild Wild Web and am not able to ascertain the author¹, which is a shame since she’s a genius:

¹ All I know is they probably come from ZatteVrienden but I don’t grok Dutch.

I just finished re-installing Google Desktop for the fifth time (I always find it annoying after a while) and was surprised with this new gadgets thing. It may not be terribly useful, granted, but cool it is (specially with the Shift hotkey). Right now I have a virtual flower, a calculator, and a clock, 12/60, that just might be the coolest time interface ever. It needs no explanation, just install it and stare at it—the epiphany will hit you in bare seconds.

Oh, this is in fact so pretty that it has got me excited once more with my color clock of yore. Maybe I’ll port it to Javascript this week, you know, just as some Javascript back-to-shape calisthenics.

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.

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.

Today’s reading, The Perry Bible Fellowship^WP, has precious few words in it, it’s a comic strip. The most disturbed and weird one I know, at times insanely funny and original. There are over 163 strips in the archive so to make this into my Today’s Reading section (which is all about pithiness) here’s a selection of my favorites:

1. Bunny Pit
2. No Survivors
3. Sun Love
4. Raft Friends
5. Trampoline
6. Barbara and Rudy
7. Hammer Screwed
8. Not Today Little One
9. Small Man
10. New Specs for Ken
11. Billy Bunny
12. Reset
13. Suicide Train
14. Painter Piece
15. Monkey Photographer
16. Gopher Girlfriend
17. Today is my Birthday
18. Left Brain, Right Brain
19. Walbert
20. Love Lizard
21. Bumble Buzzin
22. Way too much
23. Durab, Inc
24. Food Fight

Their (brilliant) author is Nicholas Gurewitch, who also happens to be a very talented artist and movie director (The Forest (Parental Advisory: It revolves around the weirdest cartoon hand-job), Ken’s New Specs).