- Holly presents Towards a Critical Framework for High School Musical, which comes perilously close to accomplishing the formidable task of making HSM interesting to me. (As the author notes in the comments, though, it may already be too late.)
- Leonard is creating an free, online-only speculative fiction anthology called Thoughtcrime Experiments and he’s paying big bucks for stories! I can’t submit because I’m a first-degree acquaintance, but other people can, cough ahem guys.
- Oh, right, and MY SISTER’S GETTING MARRIED
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Mom, you might want to skip this.
Today’s DAR is sort of about our cocktail party!
I cannot avoid using the word “viral” here and I’m sorry.
Somyr Perry, whom we know from the following clause has fantastic taste in writing, discovered Ommatidia and made a meme out of it on her blogging community, Open Salon, which as far as I can tell is Livejournal for real journalists. Most of the posts are getting tagged or collected (except the ones that aren’t), and some of them are really excellent, that last in particular. You are awesome, Open Saloners! Now buy my book.
“I cannot fucking believe this is allowed.”
The unlooked-for side effect of my generation’s financial crisis has been, for me, that the world of finance is suddenly quite interesting, and worth learning about. There’s nothing like open-mouthed horror and blind panic to inspire autodidacticism. I still know very little about how finance really works, of course, but the punch line is that most financiers apparently didn’t either.
In that vein, I recommend one of the most darkly hilarious articles I’ve read in a while.
And topical as shit too
Okay, so the season break lasted a little longer than we meant it to. But we’re buffered up, geared down, spitshined and BACK!
Sequel to Stephen’s: a gentleman by the name of Gabriel had the clever idea of taking all the words in the Proserpina stories, minus her name, and doing up an eerily well-informed wordle.
Aaand seven years later
I finally figured out an in-continuity reason why the Burly Brawl looks like a crappy video game for its second half! It is a crappy video game! The rendering engine for the Matrix itself can’t keep up with that many polygons moving that fast at a lifelike framerate, so everybody’s faces and clothing lose polygonal depth and end up looking smooth and unrealistic.
I only regret that this does not explain the increasingly monologue-driven and stupid plot. (To see me regrettably attempting to do just that, please reference The Grand All-Encompassing Star Wars Conspiracy Theory.)
Emblematism
“Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech.”
–Callie Shell
In August of 2005 I added two keywords to my personalized Google News page: “creative commons” and “obama.” It had been a year since his convention address, and it had become clear that the man simply wasn’t fading. I also wrote a journal entry, never posted, about the fact that plans to assassinate his character had already begun. “Opposition research” has a long lead time; there are folders stuffed with scandal about people who never even receive nominations, but we saw every last scrap from the file on Obama, real and imaginary.
I woke up this morning with sarcastic headlines at the ready: “Relieved Obama dons headscarf, ululates, brandishes AK-47.” “Secret Service orders pre-emptive strike against Atlanta.” “Iraq declares victory.” Cynicism is playing catchup with the unrepentant joy of last night (though even that was tempered by disappointment at Mitch McConnell and Prop 8). But at least, for once, it’s not the other way around.
In April, I drove almost literally from coast to coast across the United States–from Winston-Salem, North Carolina to San Francisco, California–in nine days and a tiny car, packed up to my eyes. I was alone for most of each day, between eight and fourteen hours on the road. I listened to podcasts for company, and music when I wanted to sing, but in between I listened to Dreams from my Father.
That kind of trip would be a transformative experience for anyone. I’d only even been a licensed driver for six months. I’m sure I’m displaying any number of issues here that tie into my own lost father, my long-delayed exit from adolescence, and the way we approach elections as the process of choosing new parents. But if nothing else, I can at last say that I chose this President, and he is a writer who does voices when he reads aloud.
I wonder what that will be like?
I am a hacker’s anus, Bob.
I worked a phone bank last night, for the second time in my life and the first time for a political candidate. (If you know me you already know which candidate. If you don’t, see if you can guess by the side-street parked car count: two Priuses, two Fits and a Yaris.)
Cold-calling is hard for anybody, but for an introvert it’s pretty awful. My stomach ached on the way home, and stories like the one about the man who told me he wasn’t voting because of the apocalypse didn’t really make it better. And I was calling people in Oregon, man! A battleground state this ain’t.
So why did I do it, and why am I going to go back? Because of a stubborn faith in Leonard’s concept of vote multipliers and a corollary syllogism of my own devising: that memory is fluid, that people are self-centered, and that therefore vote multipliers affect both the future and the perceived past.
Voting for a winner confers a perceived, and perhaps even deserved, ownership in the winner’s subsequent successes. This is why incumbents get re-elected, and why politicians who abandon campaign promises can ride them out for a while before their approval ratings begin to drop. We take credit for what we’ve done right, but don’t like believing we chose wrong.
My candidate’s going to win the election, and I think he’s going to lead us toward better things; but the more people vote for him, even in long-decided states, the more lasting support he’ll have, and the more he’ll be able to accomplish over the next eight years. It’s not just that I want to be able to look back at a positive change and say that I was part of it. It’s that I want to nudge other people from apathy into agency, and let them see that it is good.