Cut for the benefit of medically squeamish


( owowowowowowow )

Some days, it is good to realize that you are not as completely corrupted as you assumed you were. That your innocence is not totally lost. That no matter how jaded you are to goatse and shitting dick nipples and the usual filth of the dregs of the internet, there's still horrible things you have been safe from. Even if you understood Rule 34 intellectually, you did not fully grok its implications.

And yet, unfortunately, you cannot have that reassuring realization without learning of what you did not yet know. You cannot know what innocence you had, until it is taken away.

(I learned something else today, too. I had no idea that Vulcan penises are apparently different from, if compatible with, the human variety! But while the fact that I was viewing that conversation did make me sit up and take stock of my goals in life, I still found it so much less disturbing than the above.)

( Cut for banana picture )

So, in between running around like crazy and getting moved into San Diego, I've been going to art museums. And reading about art. And while there's some things of modern art that I simply do not get, or find boring (*cough*abstractexpressionism*cough*), I do find a lot of movements intruiging, and I've particularly been struck by one in particular: Futurism.

Now, if you read that page, and the founding manifesto, you'll have spotted a number of... issues to be had with this movement. Because, y'know, Fascism bad. Also, misogyny bad. Hypernationalism bad. War is not the 'hygiene of the world'. There are indeed reasons this art movement died out after the World Wars, heh.

But! I do think that a new direction, one that is influenced but not defined by Futurism, is something I could get behind. For all their (many, many) flawed ideas, there's some things here that are worth salvaging.

For one thing, it's a bit of a refutation of some of the disagreeable parts of cyberpunk. There's a rejection of the notion, for example, that to embrace technology is to give up something 'human', to be alienated from humanity  (for this trope, see: Watchmen, Ghost in the Shell, the nebulous fears of "chemicals" and "GMOs" and "nuclear", the marketability of "organic" and "natural"). On the contrary, as Jill Tarter said, "the story of humans is the story of ideas that shine light into dark corners." Humanity is technology. Oh, and, no, futuristic cyberlands don't *actually* have to be dystopias. The future could belong to the humanists!

On the other hand, cyberpunk and Futurism have a goodly bit in common. They both disassociate the audience from the immediate and attempt to force a less-stuck-in-the-past perspective. They both celebrate (even if one or the other denounces) the aesthetics of speed, of dynamism, of machines, of steel and plastic. And these are all, in my opinion, very good things.

On a less (or maybe more) serious note, I kinda just like how the stuff I've seen looks. You get that whole "looking at things not as they are in the field of vision, but with nonliteral and emotional stuff accompanying" modern schtick, without losing sight of representation entirely. I got interested in this because of Gino Severini's Armored Train in Action, which I found really striking on an aesthetic level. the photo doesn't really do it justice, because you can't see the nifty stippling effect, shared by Giacomo Balla's Abstract Speed- The Car Has Passed. I don't quite have the artistic vocabulary to articulate what I'm liking here, I don't think... but I know what I like.

Another concept from the manifestos that I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the past is inherently worthless, to be cast aside, to be destroyed. There is nothing to lose and everything to gain from studying examples of the past, to see what experiments have already been tried, to see what works and what does not. On the other hand, I wholeheartedly agree that to think the old is better simply because it is old, or to value tradition purely because of tradition, is pretty damn irrational. The study of the past, then, should be 1.) of great importance, 2.) as objective as possible, and 3.) with the aim of understanding the present and learning for the future.

In short: who analyzes the past, can guide the future. And control of the past, in this decentralized world, could (ideally and in theory) be a non-issue.

Do I know where I'm going with this? Heck no. Plus, I still suck at painting. BUT, now that I think I may have an idea of some of the ideas I want to paint, learning the skill may be a little more interesting...

Ok, this lj is going to start with one of the most cliche lj-angst-post tropes ever. ( Cut for emo, length, and for folks that don't think they should read it )

(For the record, I think I just had a minor depressive episode. It didn't go THAT far into the pit, and I still think that my adolescent conclusions on worth and strength are factually WRONG, but it's easier for me than most times to see the pseudological paths from which I drew this conclusion. At any rate, I think writing this helped. And I'm genuinely looking forward to starting my new life in San Diego on Saturday! Eee! So if this rant makes you worry.... please don't. I'm fine. I'm gonna be fantastic. It's all good.)

It has a keyboard.

No, I'm not talking about the standard QWERTY one (which... is admittedly kinda crappy, and annoying to write on for too long).

I mean I've been practicing musical scales because one of the apps has a freaking keyboard that is fun to simply bang on and make... some sort of hopefully vaguely-musical noise. It's been a long time since Music Theory, and I'm not an instrumentalist, heh.

(See, this is why I don't understand young-earth creationism. Because I know that, at times, I resemble nothing more than a confused ape clumsily banging on things. Which reminds me, I need to watch 2001: A Space Odyssey for the first time. Which I can do now. I'll get back to that.)

( Cut for length! )

So, my original plan was to wait for the iPad 3g.

Even if I didn't ever sign up for the AT&T plan, it seemed to make sense from a future-proofing standpoint to have the capability to access the internets when outside of a hotspot. There's a number of scenarios (including, say, being in airports that charge for wireless) for which this would make sense.

But then I started looking at the myriad of ways in which I could get mobile wifi through my Shiny (read: Droid) for free. Granted, these are all a little less user-friendly (and would involve rolling back Android 2.1, and then rooting the machine, and blahblahblah), but they're *free*. And certainly doable. (If it weren't, I'd be a piss-poor excuse for a CS, heh...) And compared with the whole "spending $130-for-the-$10-3g-receiver-part" thing (not to mention the $30/mo for access after that!), this is starting to look less and less like a bad idea.

My only concern, really, would be battery loss on the phone, but I've been meaning to get a portable USB power source for a while, anyways.

I'm polling whatever fellow nerdlings I find online tonight, and then sleeping on it (if nothing else, I don't think any Apple store is selling at 11 pm). We'll see what I think come morning.

Thursday night:

Picked Ho0ber up at train station. Steaks and scotch tasting flights at The Brandy Library. Missed that salon of Lee's, though, sadly.
Friday:

Movers arrived an hour early! Argh! Crazy run-around-packing-time! Also, scary thing: the head mover dude is a computer science graduate. Yipes!

Bought plane ticket home for early Thursday morning. Was able to trade in frequent flyer miles for First Class! Yay!

Dinner at Spark's Steakhouse. Fairly exceptional steaks. Decor matches a place that has seen big-time mob hits. Oh, hey, it IS a place that has seen big-time mob hits.

Avenue Q! Awesomeness! There's a picture of me getting advice from the Bad Idea Bear puppets (bought for the Broadway Cares charity drive thingy), because that just seemed perfectly appropriate in general.

Live Action Rocky Horror Picture Show! Sweet zombie Ceiling Cat, who the hell are all these kids? Are they old enough to be here?!? GET OFF MY LAWN! (Seriously, though, it was fun. Oh, and apparently shout-outs have evolved to include internet memes, to some degree. Surprisingly, they tended to work.)

Saturday:

Bought tickets at TKTS for Rock of Ages matinee, and went over to MoMA. Wish I'd gone there before. Wish we had more time to spend there. Pretty darn awesome.

Ok, Rock of Ages? Fucking ROCKS! Seriously, go see it, it's over-the-top, epic, and downright hilarious. Go see it! Now!

(Also, thank Ceiling Cat, it's been long enough since I've been in a college bar with a jukebox that I can actually ENJOY songs about the not stopping of the believing. Woo!)

Then we got some bbq, wondered around town, took in a comedy show at 11:45, and stayed out at my local until 5, which was kind of a bad idea because.....

Sunday

......woke up at 9 am to make sure Ho0ber made it to his train. Came back to apartment, fell down, went boom.

Monday

Crazy with the packings and stuff. Get phone call from recruiter-dude that GA-ASI is hiring again, and specifically asked if I was still available. Yay!

Also get email from lawyer-dude that the stupid driver's insurance holds they will no longer be liable for my car's storage fees as of.... last Thursday. Need to call lawyer-dude to make sure they can do that, because I don't exactly have anywhere else to PUT it. Boo! (Of lesser magnitude than previous yay).


And now I just need to finish packing and clearing and cleaning, and I'll be on my way!

I've always felt that the "well, scientists were wrong about X, Y, and Z, so they're probably wrong about [thing I think should be wrong], too" argument was somehow fallacious, or at least irrelevant, but I've never had a truly decent rebuttal(*). But I stumbled across this bit of writing by Asimov by way of RationalWiki, which gives a really, really good response that shows why it's a fundamental misunderstanding of science as a proccess.

The money quote: "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

Our scientific knowledge of the universe is, of course, still somewhat inaccurate. That doesn't mean that we can't take pride in the fact that it's *less* wrong than yesterday, or strive to make it yet more right tomorrow. Science doesn't offer complete, pat answers; this is a feature, not a bug. There's still unknown unknowns out there, and that's awesome.


(*Except to blame sensationalistic science "journalism", of course.)

I wanted to show somebody that horribly horribly purplely-prosed published pile of plumb p...crazy writing I found a while back, so I googled "dew-covered otters". This was of course totally misremembering the relevant line, ("bottles of wine covered with dew, and otters") but I still found the Metafilter discussion thereof. Which is a comment thread totally worth reading. I'm dying over here. Dying!

^_^