Old Personal: October 2003 Archives

Huffer

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The Breeder's Title TK was a great birthday record I think.

Oh Microsoft, let me count the ways.

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It must have been me reading a Longhorn blog, and all the Microsoft ra-ra-ness that being plagued by open-sourcers can engender, but I'm really not all that invested in MS per se. I have enough faith that my prose conveys my ambivalence, but I suppose at times that ambivalence becomes a bit too indeterminate and confusing even to myself.

Honestly though, a lot of the stuff that got bandied about was pretty heavy going, and some of it was pretty rough - I have nothing but sympathy for anyone on the recieving end of it, whether or not at the end of the day I think they brought it on themselves.

It's nice to have some thing/s that make me want to write again, the exertion does me good I think.

I think what Michel's mention of my entry in his blog did was really crystalise in my mind that I couldn't give a toss in a sense about the topic itself - I glanced at Cringely's article (I'd seen it earlier anyway) and just shrugged - that aspect of it really doesn't interest me. In a larger sense I'm just intrigued by the (in many senses) ideological conflict that engenders this level of rhetoric; but also I'd be happy to use Linux if only I didn't have to go through being a newbie again and a bunch of other things.

In terms of what I have at stake in all this, I hate to think of it this way but I am (only) an end user - obviously part of me thinks this makes me king anyway. I suppose I should blame ATI for the fact that their drivers suck ass and whenever I boot up I seem to have to change my refresh rate, and all the other software developers for fucking things up - but in a sense on MS' part, they really just can't use that as an excuse.

I really wish I knew what was up with Overnet.

I don't know that I would have bothered to comment about this, but after the Economist decided to write tripe, I suppose I can't help it.

Mahatir is a racist and delusional. I'm sorry but did we not know this? He's no better than Lee Kuan Yew in this respect (if not others) - he's a doddering old man who decides he knows everything and wants to mouth off now that he's not long/no longer in office. He over-sees a country that has institutionalised racism inscribed in it's laws - which, if nothing else, is at least honest, unlike elsewhere, where dominion is completely ellided.

Here is someone who is willing to use an adversarial people as an example of how his own people have so abjectly failed. That said, there is not (and definitely not here) any benign construction of the "other" - saying people control the world by proxy, however good it sounds or how much of a (rather funny) joke it is, does not negate the fact that it is predicated on a real sense of dislike, distrust, hatred.

But if Mahatir were not known to have distributed copies of the "International Jew" before, would this not be someone calling for the end of violence, the call for a return of pride to a group of people? Whether or not either side is more sinned against than sinning is now too internecine a knot to untangle - but if aspiration could become the pursuit of intellect, of technology, of advancement and discovery, would that not be grand?

If it were not for the fact that I cannot entirely dismiss the Economist's assertion that this is, regardless, a form of casus belli, it does not expunge the problem that Israel has a lot less to worry about than the muslim world put together from a conflict between the two. It might be a joke to some that the Jews rule the world, but it would be a very poor joke to say that Muslims do the same. And muslims don't get away with having governments who institutionalise terrorism.

I will now take one step too far and take issue with the fact that this one comment has generated more column inches than it should have because it's pushed the Jewish button. Just like Trent Lott, there are legitimate reasons why this should cause alarm and reaction. And yet why am I sick and tired of hearing about black oppression and the holocaust? Because people have said it better, and it's being said at the expense of other things - just so it can indulge a particular paltry liberal core of sympathy and outrage.

Izzit cuz I is bleck?

And if I were complaining about my own oppression rather than those of others, I'd bother to be more exacting, more selective, and less depreciative of my capital accumulation of whine.

Whoopty Doo

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I've strung bits together into what looks vaguely promising, hopefully Cari will find it funny (if she's not terribly pleased :P).

I've decided that going over to the UK will be just the thing, probably just before easter. I'll have to find someone to put me up when the time comes, mayhaps Ve-Yin, but you never know. Visiting Cari will be fun, wonder if Claire might be around. I should really mail Claire, wonder if I should mail Anthony. Should really mail Ve-Yin and Andrew. Oh, and commiserate with Delwyn about his accomodation.

I've discovered the joys of Halo, something I'm sure Eugene's familiar with (another person to mail). It's not too bad, but I get the feeling my having turned off any and all anti-aliasing is just the thing. Unless I'm feeling particularly ready to become one of those people, I don't think I'll be paying 300 bucks for a graphics card anytime soon. But yes, some modicum of fun.

Oh, another reason to mail Ve-Yin is to tell him about my lovely discovery of Misfit's of Science. Bittorrent, and Suprnova.tk are lovely lovely lovely - they're also the source of said Halo... :D.

Here She Comes Again

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It does vaguely concern me that writing here has not been much of an attraction of late, but I suppose it's not surprising. I'm not kidding though, that Hunky Dory is an absolutely fantastic Bowie album, just such frenetic energy and yet so shaped and hovering between control and exuberance.

There is a certain paltry surrender to the supernatural. Those who imagine that their computers have personalities and moods ? that is the supernatural of the blithely flacid ignorant, not the supernatural of the will, of defiance.

I wonder at points whether I am actually telling a story at all, whether I am simply stating my opinions as people can find so objectionable, and yes there is a certain cack-handedness about ill-performed obliqueness, when it becomes *so* much of a conceit ? as bad as the pointedness and directness of political intent. Sometimes I wonder whether it is ambivalence that I aspire to but rather just a struggle to get things right amidst all the geometric complexity.

Hi, My Computer's Named Annie, and...

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I really don't intend to be mean to anybody (though to people who really *don't* read this), but for fuck's sake, if you insist on ascribing mystical forces and a personality to your computer, you can fucking well go out and dance naked in the rain instead of coming crying to me when things go wrong. Whose god-damned fault?

I take it very personally when people I know are fuckwits about computers, and I'm a complete snob about it, but I find very good reason to be when people refuse to become informed about something that's so important to them. We should ALL and I say ALL, become fascists and have extension ladders. If you don't want to empower yourself there's very little I can do to help you - using computers requires you to maintain a reasonably steep learning curve, and you ignore it at your peril.

I make it a point to admit my broad range of ignorance, but learn what I need to in good time, and people cannot always expect "computer people" to know everything or want to know everything. I know about what I'm interested in, in what I use, if you want to use something else you can for god's sake find out what RTFM means (Read The Fucking Manual).

I don't do this for a living.

Isn't Bowie wonderful?

Alizee and Overnet

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Well, ahem, yes, Michel talking about Alizee? All becomes clear now. It's getting quite compulsive downloading her videos and performances. Very much like a paedophile's dream Kylie. But then she just looks young I suppose - she's 19?

And just to set things straight about Overnet, it's all my fault, and Overnet is fantastic - mess around with the connections and learn how to use port forwarding and the world is wonderful again.

Su-Lin might be interested in this :)

'It's an interesting thing,' said Spruce, 'but very few of the great masters of trash aimed low to start with. Most of them wrote sonnet sequences in youth. Look at Hall Caine - the protege of Rosetti - and the young Hugh Walpole emulating Henry James. Dorothy Sayers wrote religious verse. Practically no one ever sets out to write trash. Those that do don't get very far.'

From Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour Trilogy (pp. 673-674).

I Take It All Back

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Actually, now that I think about it, the article I just posted on the X-Men is actually the epitome of all the things I really dislike about a certain kind of criticism, that I tend to conflate as Marxist.

Not that the article is not perceptive and well, the accusations it makes are actually quite fitting. It's just that there's a general tone about it that is rife with that dramatic turn for revelation and the relish and strut of political discovery. However much I am swayed by the accuracy of the accusations it makes, and obviously I feel them to be necessary, even essential, to any reading of the text, yet the problem lies in that this kind of writing is just so very simply not very good literary analysis. Beyond that, it is also just not very fair or descriptive - to the extent that it becomes a kind of naive imposition on the text, and lacks any real engagement with the complexity that accompanies any text deemed worthy of comment.

Just as examples that spring to mind, what of the aesthetics of spectacle involved? The endless close reading that can take place in examining the narratorial and textual elements of the form the text takes - the framing of the action, the "how" of the story being told in a series of panels, the issues of focalisation and perspective that are involved. Not to mention the sexual fetishism inherent in the depiction of bodies, the textual and verbal ticks that pervade the series, somehow independant of the change-over of writers. And I suppose I could make some snarky comment about ignoring how funny things are but that would be somewhat unfair.

Not that I am not guilty of doing similar things - and to be honest it is very effective as a kind of rhetorical trump, to undermine the politics of a text - and yet I find that it's really the easy, and lazy way out, an effective way of dismissing texts rather than examining them.

Accusation, if nothing else, detracts from the more fruitful examination (if you want to retain the same ideological slant as accusation allows) of the mechanics, the emotional appeal if you will, of how and why these texts are then still so attractive and persuasive. If you wish to move beyond idle politics, then you come to the point where these caveats become a baseline, a point of departure from which you examine the million other things that are of so much more interest. I appreciate that he's writing in response to something, working against the flow of something, but it's just how predictable he has to make it that is rather disappointing.

Of course it's politically compromised. Deal with it.

Naughty X-Men

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Without mentioning that I've been spending most of the past week catching up on the edonkey-available Uncanny X-Men, I found this rather sensible, if somewhat annoying (though reasonably well written) article on why X-Men was not concieved as the kind of trope for racial tolerance it's accepted to be today. Vive la Marx.





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This page is a archive of entries in the Old Personal category from October 2003.

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