Out there in the wide, wide interwebs, there exist subcultures you never dreamed about. A blogger named Kottke reminded me of the world surrounding fans of My Little Pony. This includes people who take sound and video clips of the cartoon and make dubsteb music videos to post on the youtubes. This is called dubtrot, of course.
What I'm listening to right now.
My Little Pony – Rainbowstep (Skrillex Dubstep). Does this even require commentary? It speaks for itself.
"I never knew that a playground could look like a fun-loving giant robot and a prison for hardened criminals at the same time." – Thus writes someone at Komboh blog. How could I disagree? – this is fabulous. Plus, I really like the guy's blog website design. It's really awesome.
I have been addicted to graphic design websites since before they existed. Um… how is this possible? Well I don't really mean websites, do I? When I worked for the University of Minnesota Libraries, in the late 1980's, I discovered a magazine called Graphis (the magazine still exists). It was a glossy collection of the best of graphic design and advertising design. I would spend hours paging slowly through back issues. It was almost a kind of meditation. It was also a way to kind of stay in touch with my creative side, and to get a feel for the world. So now, all these years later, I still page idly through graphic design and arts magazines – I just do it online, now. I visit My Modern Metropolis blogs almost daily, for example. And I regularly discover new sites like Komboh, referenced above.
I have been known to log on to some chat utility or another (i.e. AIM or Yahoo) to interact with some long-lost acquaintances now and then. There are lot of bots lurking out there in these nether parts of the internet. Mostly, of course, one wants to ignore such things as bots. But the other day I was inspired, I decided to see what the bot had to say for itself. I was unimpressed, except by my own strangeness. I have changed the usernames to protect the innocent and the guilty.
bogybaggle: heya.
jaredrobot: really?
bogybaggle: hey! 21/femaIe here. you?
jaredrobot: robot. indeterminate age.
bogybaggle: NO i am not a bot
jaredrobot: i know. i am.
bogybaggle: hmm….. have we ever chatted be4?
jaredrobot: yes. we are one and the same. one mind. hive mind.
bogybaggle: oh sorry…. i am reaIIy forgetfuII sometimes. but anyways whats up?
jaredrobot: i'm suffering from an epistemological crisis.
bogybaggle: hey i have some pictures of me on my profiIe on this site if you wouId Iike to see them?
jaredrobot: i don't have the ability to integrate visual data.
bogybaggle:
yeah? ok weII you wiII have to signup there to make sure that your not a
kid because i have a coupIe R rated pictures on there
bogybaggle: but dontt worry it is completly free and easy to signup. heres the signup page https://[redacted]
jaredrobot: kid robot. you're a genius.
bogybaggle: A bot? not hardly babe. Are you?
jaredrobot: yep.
bogybaggle: when u get Iogged in then search for my profiIe bogybaggle.
bogybaggle: if u want to see my R rated pics. the gaIlIery password is xxxfun
jaredrobot: yes, mistress. i'm yours to command.
bogybaggle: brb.
jaredrobot: that's what they all say.
What I'm listening to right now.
Bumblebeez 81, "I Come With Water."
[This is a back-post, written at the date shown but only saved in draft form for a very long time. I finally decided to go through and officially "post" a bunch of old draft posts lying around.]
I am going to join those in the interwebs eulogizing the Encyclopedia Britannica's print edition – after 244 years, it's going online-only.
I actually own a print edition of Britannica. I don't have it with me here in Korea, obviously – it's in storage, with my 4 or 5 thousand other books. It's not exactly a recent edition. It's 1950, I think - I bought it, used, from a Salvation Army thrift store in Minneapolis. I would estimate probably read about 40% of it.
Reading encyclopedias is an old hobby, for me. We had a World Book Encyclopedia when I was a child, which I'm fairly certain I read from A to Z when in my pre-teens – but not in order (which is why I'm not really certain if I read the whole thing). One thing I miss about paper encyclopedias, when using Wikipedia (which I also love, nevertheless), is the ability to just keep reading: the article following the one you'd come to the encyclopedia for, and the one following that, and the one after that. This is not, in fact, something that's not possible with Wikipedia – it's actually only a design choice, that could be easily remedied, by adding prominent (or not-so-prominent) "next article" and "previous article" buttons to each Wikipedia page. But they choose not to do that – and it's a loss, in my opinon. Nevertheless, I had another habit with my paper encyclopedias that's quite easy to simulate with Wikipedia: I would take down a volume at random, and open it to a random page, and begin reading; Wikipedia's "random article" button provides the same result. I use it many times every time I'm online.
A while back I began writing a blog entry about my weird relationship with Wikipedia. At the time, I wanted to focus on why it is I don't write for Wikipedia anymore. I used to. I had some writing associated mostly with geography topics, and even originated a few articles in English Wikipedia on Mexican towns and municipalities. The short answer as to why I quit writing for Wikipedia is that I'm lazy – their standards for reference and citation grew gradually more stringent than I was willing to work with. But the long answer (or rather, the psychologically more insightful answer) is that I got tired of writing what I thought were well-referenced and well-cited articles and having others changing what I'd written beyond recognition. So I'm happy at this point to read other people's writing. I've become a passive consumer of the output of egos less fragile than my own.
To return to the loss of the print edition of Britannica – I think it's a little bit sad, because of my history with encyclopedias. But I understand it, and I'm not going to launch into a luddist lament. I think that technologically, we're not far off from where we can turn any electronic content into a paper book whenever we have the urge to have a paper book – there are already automatic book-publishing devices out there (see this recent article and picture below).
According to my blogomatic interface thingy, this will be my 2000th blog post. I feel so excited, on this significant anniversary. Well… not really.
But I will take this milestone to reflect, again (as I have [broken link! FIXME] before), on what this blog means to me.
Um. It's surprising how few people actually read it. Fewer read it than two years ago, when I made my 1000th post. I'm not sure what that means. I suppose that one thing that it means is that my friends and family have better things to do, or I've been in Korea so long that they've mostly forgotten about me. I guess that's ok – I've come to realize that I mostly write just for myself.
It's true that I get a limited number of random visitors who link through to the blog from google searches. Currently, the number one search that leads to this blog is: "오승근 떠나는 님아". Go ahead – try it. Why? I think that for whatever reason, I'm one of the few bloggers who's successfully posted a clearly-labeled link to a video of this Korean singer's song.
Recently, someone came to my blog after typing in "the world is messed up" into the google's search box. That was funny.
[broken link! FIXME]
I enjoy the fact that I have the ability to "look over the shoulders" of the people who visit my blog in this way. I've learned where the google spiders live (Taiwan, Mountain View CA, somewhere in Belgium, Council Bluffs IA) – they often visit shortly after someone follows a link to my blog from a search page, and crawl through various random pages of it.
Since coming to Ilsan, I've become very discouraged about some aspects of my "stay in Korea project" – as might be evident reading between the lines (or simply reading the lines, at times) of the blog. Whatever I do next – whether I stay or move on to some other thing – I will continue posting here. It's cathartic, and entertaining, and it's a good self-discipline, too. Since the beginning of this year (2012) I've posted twice a day.
Sometimes the posts are boring and self-indulgent journalling. Sometimes they're random "found online" things: videos, pictures, humor, politics, poetry, philosophy. Sometimes they're evidence of my dilettante's approach to languages. Regardless, the whole of it is not that different in principle from the paper journals I maintained for much of my life before the advent of blogdom – and I don't mind others reading along: the transparency is purgative. Which isn't to say there isn't some self-editing going on – of course there is. It therefore becomes a sort of self-creation, too. Or self-curation, anyway.
Anyway, thanks to whoever happens to be reading. ^_^
~jared
[broken link! FIXME] I have recently been exploring googlebooks. There are some interesting and unusual out-of-copyright materials there. This morning I have been perusing a text by someone named Francis Hopkinson entitled "A Pretty Story," originally published in 1774 and reprinted (I suspect from the original proofs since the text is full of 18th century typography not matching the 1860's edition date).
The story is a sort of political allegory, a rather thinly veiled account of the colonization of North America by the British, and relevant to the impending American Revolution (note that Hopkinson was apparently a signer of the Declaration of Independence).
I think I enjoy reading texts such as these as much for their archaic style and language as for the actual content, although making cultural comparisons of the then-to-now sort, in the style of a time-traveling anthropologist, is fun too.
On a technical side, I'd like to rant.
<rant>
Googlebooks' interface annoys me, because it keeps reverting to Korean Language, because of my IP address. I'm not opposed to using the Korean interface, per se, but I see it as a technical glitch whenever default language of web sites is driven by the geotagging information attached to the user's IP address when so much other information is available to the browser (e.g. my computer's preferred language setting, my browser's preferred / installed language, not to mention the language of the text being viewed – why would someone viewing an 18th c. political tract written in English not prefer [or at the very least, be uncomfortable with] an English language web interface?). I especially resent internationalized web content that fails to offer a clear control to change languages when viewing the page. Googlebooks apparently doesn't like to offer this option clearly on their page – although, if you scan it carefully, the extended URL contains a language flag, but even when you toggle this manually (changing the "ko" to "en"), the page nevertheless reverts if you follow any in-site links.
[broken link! FIXME]
</rant>
Here are some screenshots from this archaic text.
The introduction, below.
[broken link! FIXME]
First page, below.
[broken link! FIXME]
I like the old-style "long s" in the word possessed (roughly, "poffeffed").
█████ ███ SOPA █████████ ████. ███████ strike █████ ██████ ██████████.
█████████ ████ ██████ censorship issues ████████. Net neutrality █████████████ █████.
█████████████.
I started another blog today, sort of by accident.
How does one start a blog by accident?
… One navigates a Korean website with a poor grasp of Korean.
Now, what shall I do with it? Not a clue.
What I’m listening to, right now.
Underworld, “Beautiful Burnout.”
There is a meme (perhaps started at xkcd) that says that following the first (non parenthetical) link on a wikipedia article, recursively, always leads to the article entitled “Philosophy.” Someone built a widget online to test this. You can try out random wikipedia articles, and see them leading to Philosophy – it draws a tree. Here’s a tree I made with some random articles using the “random” button.
There are some caveats (naturally) to how this works – explained here (read the comments thread). I like the example of a circular set of articles (try “Exogeny” in the widget).
“Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.” – Steve Jobs
Once upon a time, I was a huge fanboy of Apple Corp in its first incarnation (see left) – my uncle’s Apple ][, which entered our household when I was still in junior high in the late 70’s, was my first and most excellent exposure to computers, both as tool for writing and for learning programming. Not to mention killing vast amounts of time with games like space invaders.
Frankly, I’ve always felt that Apple Corp in its second incarnation, post-Jobs-exile, was less thrilling or impressive. I found the latter-day, closed-garden design philosophy personally repugnant (I think this is the open-source programming geek, in me), and I felt the products were over-priced and excessively hyped. More marketing than engineering, basically. I have so far managed to get past 10% of the new century without owning or interacting with an Apple product.
Nevertheless, I believe that Steve Jobs was undoubtedly a Thomas Edison type figure for our age. His passing is premature.
A blogger named Christopher Carr (at a site called League of Ordinary Gentlemen – a blog name that I somewhat dislike, by the way, because citing it makes me feel like I’m on a street corner handing out ads for a strip club) is refuting some ideas he ran across on another blog by someone named Dr Helen. The level of writing and the way he manages the ideas is spectacular.
He uses the term “scrooge mcduckery” to describe the sort of wannabe-John-Galtism that seems to underlie some portion of the teapartiers. Here’s a great extended quote from the specific blog entry:
Going through the comments over there at Dr. Helen’s and measuring the levels of entitlement, uncompromising self-righteousness, baseless notions of victimhood, and B-team Scrooge McDuckery might be an appropriate exercise for Introduction to Physics students. As if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years, advocates of going Galt suggest the appropriate response to the democratic government not doing exactly what you-the-one-citizen-among-many like is to sit back and be pampered, as if the baby boomers haven’t already been doing this in spirit for years.
Actually it’s all a sort of prologue to a paean to Victor Hugo and Les Miserables, and, having never been much of a fan of Hugo, myself, I stopped reading it. But the introductory part really captures quite well a lot of what’s caused me, in recent years, to turn rather leftward from my earlier infatuation with Ayn Randian ideations.
Even five years ago I still happily described myself as having strong libertarian tendencies, but I’ve become so uncomfortable with these tendencies in recent times that I cannot in good conscience use the word libertarian any more – at least about myself, anyway. Perhaps these years in communitarian Korea, where even the hard-right conservatives still believe in things like universal healthcare and massive government-funded infrastructure projects, has colored my worldview.
I’m not really going anywhere with this, but I so loved Carr’s use of the term “scrooge mcduckery” (and by the way, I loved Scrooge McDuck comics when I a kid – why?). So I had to post this comment.
Today is Korean Thanksgiving (Chuseok). I went on a walk. The city is more shut down than Mexico City on Superbowl Sunday (which, contrary to preconceptions, is the most shut-down I ever saw that city).
Hurry, hurry, everyone. Go to your home town, and propitiate some ancestors.
Maybe you can google them first, and find out what they need – google presented a chuseok-themed googledoodle today.
Ok, bye. Happy Holiday.
I found a website (named “Project Implicit,” by something called IAT Corp, hosted at Harvard) that makes some claim to evaluate the kind of unconscious mental associations between categories like race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and other semantic fields (like good vs. bad, American vs. not-American, etc.).
You do these rapid response categorization tests and then the test tells you how you tend to lean in your alleged “automatic preferences.” I harbor all kinds of skepticism about this sort of test, on multiple counts. I might discuss some of these skepticisms later, but for now, I’ll present my personal results on two of the tests (in the spirit of disclosure and for those curious).
The first test I took was with regard to the African-American category (Black) vis-a-vis the European-American category (White). Impressionistically, the alternation between labeling as Black vs. African-American on the one hand and White vs. European-American on the other hand struck me as inconsistent or random, although I can’t say for sure that wasn’t a designed inconsistency (e.g. something intentionally random as a built-in part of the test’s brain-probe, so to speak).
| Below is the interpretation of your IAT performance, followed by questions about what you think it means. The next page explains the task and has more information such as a summary of what most people show on this IAT. |
|
Your Result
Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American compared to European American. |
| The interpretation is described as ‘automatic preference for European American’ if you responded faster when European American faces and Good words were classified with the same key than when African American faces and Good words were classified with the same key. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as ‘slight’, ‘moderate’, ‘strong’, or ‘little to no preference’. Alternatively, you may have received feedback that ‘there were too many errors to determine a result’. |
I quickly felt that I was aware of “how” the test worked – it’s hard to explain so I suggest you just try it for yourself. I admit that from the start, I felt wary (on guard, so to speak) with regard to my own possible prejudice, and once I felt I understood how the test worked, I perhaps attempted to compensate. Assuming that the underlying prejudice I presumed myself to be battling (as a White American raised in a 90%+ white community) was one of preference toward European-Americans, it appears (and I can only say “appears” as I hardly know what all was operating, both in the test and in my own brain) I compensated successfully.
I found the first test unpleasant. The business of matching Whites with “Good” words and Blacks with “Bad” words (and then subsequently vice-versa) left a bad taste in my mouth. It was like the underlying message was: “everyone’s a racist, we just want to see what kind you are.” It was an exercise in reinforcing stereotypes, whether positive ones or bad ones.
The second test wasn’t really unpleasant so much as downright ridiculous. It was supposed to look at the European-American/Native-American contrast vis-a-vis the American/un-American (Foreign) contrast. The visual images drew on stereotypes even worse than the first test (see screenshot below). Of course, stereotypes are the point, and therefore it’s utterly conceivable that they’re intentional. Still, it’s awkward for someone who tries to be analytical about these things.
The whole business of what words were “American” vs. “Foreign” struck me as silly – they were all place names – essentially, European place names versus American place-names of Native American etymology. What is this contrast supposed to show? That Americans know the names of American cities? What about the allegedly atrocious geographical knowledge of average Americans? Is this test trying to link bad geographical knowledge with some type of racial (or racist) stereotype or another? Or is it assuming good geographical knowledge? They’re aware that Miami is in Latin America, right? And that Seattle is in Canada? And Moscow is “Foreign” – but what about the guy sitting in Moscow, Idaho, taking the test? I’ve been there. It’s near the Nez Perce Reservation. Did they take that into account?
What does this test really mean? What is it looking at? What does it have to do with nativism, white-supremacism, pro- vs. anti-immigration stances, etc.? It’s obviously complex, but I felt immediately that the test designers had at least as much ideological baggage as I personally brought to the table, and they didn’t even do much work to conceal it. I certainly doubt they had made much effort to evaluate their own prejudices, in the design of the test (especially in light of the apparent socio-linguistic naivety on display in the onomastics).
I felt a strong impulse to try my best to “game” the test. I have no idea whether my effort to game the test worked, but it appears to have, since I got the result I intended: I got myself to show up as a nativist, roughly. But of course, the test designers could argue that I was merely “aiming for” the “automatic preference” I was already ideologically inclined toward. Here is my result.
| Below is the interpretation of your IAT performance, followed by questions about what you think it means. The next page explains the task and has more information such as a summary of what most people show on this IAT. |
|
Your Result
Your data suggest a moderate association of White Am. with Foreign and Native Am. with American compared to Native Am. with Foreign and White Am. with American. |
| The interpretation is described as ‘automatic association between White Am. and American’ if you responded faster when White Am. images and American were classified with the same key than when White Am. images and Foreign were classified with the same key. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic association may be described as ‘slight’, ‘moderate’, ‘strong’, or ‘little to no preference’. Alternatively, you may have received feedback that ‘there were too many errors to determine a result’. |
So what does it all mean? I’m not sure. I might take some more tests and report back – they’re nothing if not interesting.
Today marks a new milestone on my blog: I have received my first bit of "targetted" spam in my blog comments. Up to this point, all the spam received in the comments sections on my blog have been what you might call "widecast" – just throwing out advertising for cheap internet shoes or jewelry or other products, willy-nilly, showing zero awareness of my blog's content, potential audience, etc.
But today I received a spam comment from someone (something) named Jenny, in not-bad Konglish, advertising some kind of cultural event (or coupon club – I can't quite figure it out). I'm not going to do her (he? it?) the favor or reproducing the comment's web address, but I felt some reluctance simply to delete it from the record without observing its passing.
It feels like a milestone, because, instead of being utterly random spam, it's spam-with-a-target – it obviously was placed by someone (or some program) that had a minimal awareness of my blog's "location" and audience. We can call it contextualized spam, as oxymoronic as that sounds.
Here is the text of the spam comment, with the original business name cleverly disguised and with the website address expurgated (because I don't want to reward the spammer).
Come and visit SejongBlahblah on Sunday of the last week of the month. You can find many different artist and singers' performances that are free to anyone! Also, SejongBlahblah is currently having 1+1 ticket event for foreigners. You can purchase one package from ten different packages and get one free ticket with your purchase! If you are interested and want to find out more about this event, you can come out website: https://??? SejongBlahblah is a combination of about 30 culture & art organizations including performance halls, museums and art museums located in the walking distance centering around Sejong-no, where Gwanghwamun Square is located.
This is almost relevant. More so than regular spam, anyway. It got me to reflecting on the possibility that the boundary between spam and not-spam might be somewhat fluid… somewhat fuzzy. Which, of course, makes me think of spam sitting too long in a refrigerator: fuzzy spam. That reminds me of the Chuseok (Korean Thanksgiving) gift I received from my boss at LBridge a few years ago. A gift set of spam. Chuseok is fast approaching.
<rant>
Yesterday when I landed on the google homepage, I was interested in the googledoodle (“google doodle,” the customized, constantly changing logo-artwork around the word “google”), because it was obscure and artistic in a style that caught my attention. So I went to hover the cursor over the googledoodle, which will give a short explanation of what it’s about.
Lo, to my dismay, the googledoodle hovertext was hangeulized. It was a han-googledoodle. This struck me as annoying, but fortunately, I can read a little bit of Korean. It said: “호르헤 루이스 보르헤스 탄생 112주년” – [horeuhe ruiseu boreuheseu tansaeng 112 junyeon = Jorge Luis Borges’ 112th birtday]. Charming. A nice bit of googledoodling, to be sure (see picture). And… I love JLB, of course – how could I not, given my literarophilosophical predilictions? So, that’s a given.
But I felt a sensation of annoyed, impending rantiness about the issue of the hovertext, itself. I have been annoyed, before, because of a website’s laziness (that’s my perception of the site programmers affect, I mean) with respect to what I would call “language detection issues.”
Yes, it’s true that I’m in Korea. And my IP address says so. But there’s plenty of evidence available to the browser’s page-rendering software that can tell the webpage in question that I would prefer presentation of information in English – after all, that’s my computer’s OS installation language, and that’s my browser’s default language. Both pieces of information are in no way concealed from the browser, as far as I know. Most notably, I have visited plenty of sites that recognize my language (even before I log on – and I never save cookies so that’s not what’s going on, either) – inlcuding, lo and behold, gmail, which presumably shares programming expertise with googledoodlers, coxisting together in the same giant chocolate-factory-by-the-bay, as they do.
So when I see things like that – let’s call it “IP-address-driven language defaulting behavior” – it just pisses me off. It’s not that I don’t like the Korean – I even welcomed the brief puzzle that the hovertext presented. But it’s the fact that it seems to represent a parochial, lazy approach to solving a much more elegantly solvable web programming problem – that’s what annoys me.
Hence my desire to make this little rant, here.
</rant>
And, P.S., Happy Birthday to that benevolent bonaerense, blind prophet of postmodernism!
Sullyblog talks about one of my pet subjects, density, and posts this amazing little video. Too awesome not to share.
Lilium Urbanus from Joji Tsuruga on Vimeo.
In an entirely implicit way, the video demonstrates the underlying organicity of cities. Plus, how cool is it, to imagine a city shaped like a flower? Samsung Engineering could build it – probably in some oil-statelets back yard.
I'm not even close to agreeing with everything blogger IOZ writes, but this little summary in a recent post really captures a lot of information and ideas in a very compact bit of prose. I must quote:
The problem is in fact not that people need jobs but that people need money, and hobbling them to a desk or factory floor is the only moral and legitimate means of funneling currency into their empty jugs. We need to have fuller employment so that more people are getting paid so that the consumer economy expands ad inf[initum] and repeat as necessary. There are, if you consider it even briefly, a half million or so unexamined assumptions underlying all of this.
He goes on to declare that both democrats and republicans are silly, which I can marginally agree with, but also that Barack Obama is a murderer (which I will grant is provisionally true, but only in the same sense that every modern American president trying to manage an empire ultimately beyond his control has been a murderer). I'm less comfortable with such rhetorical flights. But the preceding thought about jobs cuts to the core of the limitations of life on our increasingly Potemkin Planet.
His conclusion: "Beyond the merely pecuniary and the venial: what does your life mean to you beyond your paystub and your appetites?"
I'm working on the answer to this, and feel I'm making only a little progress. But I agree it needs to be sought.
The humor in this picture I found online is very geeky, very inside-jokey, but it made me laugh out loud. Do you see it? It’s pretty subtle. If you see it, you’re a geek. If you laugh, you’re a nerd, too.
I’m not in fact excited by this new thing out there called google+ (google plus). It’s not entirely rational. I use facebook, and in fact, I dislike it. I’m a perfect profile of an early adopter when it comes to this type of thing. Yet I don’t want to. Here’s how I’m thinking about it.
For the last half decade, I have viewed google and how I use it as a rather “professional space.” I rely on it, utterly, being an expat with only remote access to the servers that host my underlying internet domain names and email addresses. It’s also where I keep my writing (such as it is – having once lost an entire novel to a hard drive failure), I now keep my writing in google docs as well as on two different hard drives, most of the time.
Meanwhile, my attitude about “social networks” such as facebook is that there is something, at core, deeply “unprofessional” about them. So in google+ I find my “professional” webspace trying to elbow its way into my “unprofessional” one, and my gut reaction is: “no, these things need to stay separate.”
I don’t ever want to be in a situation where something involving my “social presence” online compromises my ability to access my professional webspace. You hear horror stories about people getting banned from facebook due to some misunderstood post, which involves some controversial statement or even the behavior of some online “friend.” I can’t risk losing access to tools such as gmail and google docs, at this point – they are integrated into my current lifestyle too deeply.
I’m not sure if this is entirely rational. But even as it is, I sometimes dread having some online acquaintance post something embarrassing or inappropriate on my facebook – given it’s a space also accessible to many former bosses and coworkers as well as my current boss (not to mention former and current students!). People will say, “well, but Jared, you post so much personal and deep and intimate stuff on this blog! What’s the difference?” And I will say, only, “that’s a good point.” But I would differentiate only the following: I have absolute curatorial control over my blog. I own it. I own the server it’s on (well, I rent it – but I control it). Facebook, on the other hand, says right in its “end user agreement” that they are the ones with curatorial control of your content, and you hear stories about people who put things on facebook and can’t make them disappear or can’t edit them later. Or about the people who get banned from facebook for some misunderstood post or comment. More than once, I’ve gone back and changed some past post in this blog, after reconsidering the impact of the kind of impression it might make on some reader or another.
Well, that’s all not that relevant. I’m feeling like this is a pretty rambling, incoherent attempt at a rant.
All I’m saying is that I don’t feel at all interested in trying google plus, despite despising facebook and yet being utterly “married” to it, at this point – I value its ability to keep me in touch with people.
Unrelatedly, what I’m listening to right now.
K-os, “Hallelujah.” [UPDATE: the following sentence is no longer true. Youtube embed was used, the German one had rotted anyway.] The embedded video is from some German website, since the youtube version was blocked in Korea (grumble annoyance grumble).
What I’m listening to right now.
I didn’t discover the Afghan Whigs until fairly recently. But they are a true 90s band. I feel like their sound is the halfway point between the Psychedelic Furs and Nirvana. That’s pretty impressionistic. I’m really stuck on this track, at the moment.
I’m trying for a new “feature” on this here blog thingy. I’ve tried things like it before. I could grandiosely call it: The Soundtrack to the Film Version of My Autobiography. Which is to say, TSttFVoMA? Maybe let’s just call it: Background Noise.
OK. Most everyone reading this blog can now become annoyed with me.
I'm experimenting with embedding a KPop-playing widget on the right-hand column. So… Watch out! You can make it stop by clicking the ipod-looking gadget's pause button, if it's annoying too much.
I will remove it once I have received 3 complaints. My mother likely will be one of them (probably more because it messes up her dial-up access of my blog-page than because she dislikes KPop music, although I suspect that might also apply).
Actually, having had it in place for less than an hour, I may be one of the complainants, for that matter.
Over at the Atlantic – probably my favorite website – Alexis Madrigal blogs about what he calls "the Gold-Plated Age of Web Design" (namely, the mid 1990's). He does this under the guise of a rant about April Fool's day, which I am mostly too earnest to enjoy.
I, myself, was guilty of making websites of the sort he describes – most notably, the website I made for the AP Spanish class I was teaching in the fall 1997, which I wish I still had the materials for, as it was awesomely bad from a design standpoint, although I remain marginally proud of the content (it was, thematically, meant to be a sort of "internet of fictional places from Latin American literature" – I had called it Macondonet).
Madrigal's blog entry includes the following quote, which I simply must reproduce.
This was also back when designers still mostly made fancy chairs and clothes, so web page design was a little like a bunch of nerds getting together to critique each other's tucked-in t-shirts and faded black jeans. It wasn't, "Maybe you should wear a suit;" it was, "You need more robots on your t-shirt."
For some reason the nerd-critique, such as he describes it, made me very very LOL.
This xkcd comic seemed like a perfect summary of my last career. Study it carefully – it’s the most exact description of computer programming and application development ever produced.
My third twinge of tweegret, today. Rather than try to explain, read this article. Seriously.
Normally I try to stay away from the vast internet realms characterized by the charming label “NSFW.” But @MayorEmannuel is a new masterpiece, apparently: Literature meets Politics meets Cultural Crit meets NSFW Obscenity. And Madrigal’s article about it is brilliant!
And no, I still have no twitter account.
I really like this super intelligent, well-argued rant about someone else's rant about the principle of double-space versus single-space between sentences in a single paragraph. I don't actually care, one way or the other, but I love that someone can argue the points so cogently, tearing apart another's poor arguments.
Fonts and typography fascinate my, but I'm unable, for the most part, of forming strong opinions on their aesthetics. I'm perhaps more strongly opinionated in the realms of usage or orthography – in a scathingly anti-prescriptivist direction.
Not sure what my point is, in this post, except to reveal that I think about these things way too much – aren't there better things to do with one's brain?
One of my favorite internet utilities, wikipedia, is begging for money. I am normally the sort of person that would succumb to these kinds of pleas: I’m a lifetime member of Minnesota Public radio, I’m a lifetime member of my university’s alumni association. I believe in supporting non-profit organizations from which I derive direct benefit. And it is absolutely incontrovertible that I derive mountains of benefit from the vast wikithing. But… I doubt I’ll give any money to wikipedia. Why?
Two words: Jimmy Wales. Rather than being a large, professional organization asking for financial support, the tone of the campaign comes across as a Jimmy-Wales-branded, typically megalomaniacal, whining-for-dollars. Wikiwails. I don’t want to give that narcissistic asshole a single devalued KRW, despite the fact that I love the product he helped to innovate. Even the mere fact that the management of wikipedia somehow thought that the idea of branding the plea-for-funds with Mr Wales’ face was a good one is itself an overt sign of the degree to which the man’s weird personality seems dysfunctionally to dominate the organization. If his name and face weren’t attached to the organization, I would donate. I promise.
As things stand, I’ve even reduced my daily visit quotient to well under my normal 30 articles average – because I get tired of looking at his self-satisfied, overly-earnest face.
This looks really amazing.
I have some thoughts, however. First, I’m not really up on how this works, these days, but 20 years ago I wrote my senior thesis in the field linguistics on syntax-related computational parsing issues that had a significant bearing on the field of machine translation, so I’m quite aware of the complexities involved. I’m a big fan of google translate, too – but there are huge limitations.
I would run out and get this app just for the novelty factor, except for two major issues that prevent me:
1) I’m still 100% boycotting all things Apple. Give me a few more years.
2) Right now, it appears to only work for Spanish-English/English-Spanish, and I already got that app directly installed in my brain, during my time in Mexico in the 80’s. And even if it was providing Korean-English, if the quality of the translation is similar to google translate (and I suspect it could only be worse, since google is state-of-the-art), then Korean-English is nowhere near the level of reliability or useability as, say, much more closely-related language pairs like Spanish-English – most of what you get out of google translate for Korean-English/English-Korean, in either direction, is still utter gobbledy-gook – just hints of meaning, essentially syntaxless strings of word-glosses.
(Hat tip Sullyblog)
Most of what happens in facebook, in my opinion, is simply a re-imagining of various aspects of how humans have always organized their social lives. Perhaps it makes things a little more "transparent," but it's hardly as revolutionary as people make claims for. However, I've recently experienced something that I'm having trouble reconciling with "real world" parallels: I've been unfriended.
It doesn't mean much if someone who is strictly an "internet friend" unfriends you. It's just an ending of the relationship, such as it was, on the same terms as it started. But most of my facebook friends are "real world" friends. Maybe not people I've seen much, in the last decade or two, but still people I can say that at some point in my past (recent or remote), I had a real, interactive, face-to-face friendship with – however brief. What does it mean when such a person unfriends me?
It's a little bit odd, because I don't always notice right away – it's not like facebook gives you a little message that says "So-and-so doesn't like you anymore." The three cases where I'm aware of having been unfriended, I became aware because people I thought were already my "friends" have suddenly started appearing in my "recommended friends" listing. I will say to myself: hmm, that's confusing. But sure enough, if I go look, they're not my friend anymore.
What's the etiquette, here? Maybe a short return message, "It was good while it lasted. Have a nice life." Maybe they were annoyed with my blog posts, or my rants, or my metanegativity. But I have facebook friends whose posts I find annoying – I just block their posts from my "news feed" – it seems more polite than unfriending. Unfriending sends a definite message.
Here's the metaphor I've developed. Blocking the news feed of a facebook friend is like throwing away unanswered letters, in pre-internet parlance. Or ignoring phone messages. We all do this – whether short-term or indefinitely – with people we feel we've grown apart from or struggle to communicate with. But unfriending is a bit like taking a picture of yourself throwing away an unanswered letter, or ignoring a phone message, and then publishing that picture in a newspaper, which the person who was trying to communicate may or may not notice. Subtle.
It might be an interesting exercise to maintain a published list of unfriends, just for entertainment purposes. But, although entertaining, that would be to dwell on the negative, which is something I keep reminding myself is better to avoid.
Is this meant to be a rant? Not really. I can see that maintaining facebook "friendships" with people you no longer feel a connection with, for whatever reason, as leading to a sort of "cluttered" feeling. Better to sweep out the cupboards, periodically. Maybe there should be some kind of etiquette for unfriending – a sort of dialogue: "So-and-so would like to end the friendship. OK?" If you say OK, then you acknowledge, and no hard feelings. That's more how real friendship works, and then fails – there's some back and forth, as it comes to a close.
… or, catching the internet with its pants down.
It’s pretty hard to capture the ephemerality of hilarious spelling mistakes and typos on well-maintained websites. But I did it. And with only a little bit of guilt, I post the result here. I mean no disrespect to Max Fisher of The Atlantic, where I found the error – in this age of automatic spell checking, errors of this sort are easily made and missed – I’m guilty of much worse ones, myself. But I do find a delicious irony in the specific error made, given that he used to be a food writer.
So having said that, the absolute best part of his article about last year’s secret nuclear standoff between the US, Russia and Libya was the serendiptous typo that allowed him to write, “U.S. officials worried about the security of the casks. It would have been easy for anyone with a gun and a truck to drive up, overpower the guard, use the crane to load the casks onto the truck, and drive off into the vast Libyan dessert.”
I so enjoyed the poetic image of a gang of terrorists driving truckloads of enriched uranium around a Candylandified Sahara.
Sadly, the error was very rapidly corrected. In the time I took to write this post, the delightful dessert was Orwellianly transmogrified into a workaday desert. But I had the amazing fortuity to have done the page “refresh” in a different window, and hadn’t closed the original. Consequently, I am able to present, with great pride, exceedingly rare “before and after” screenshots of the error in question, below. [Click thru images to view original full size]
Before:
After:
I opened a help-desk ticket with my blog host (TypePad) just now. Normally, I wouldn't publicize it, but the specific problem is intriguingly humorous. It's exactly the sort of computer error that an itinerant epistemologist such as myself deserves. Here's the ticket as currently stands (slightly redacted). I'll post updates on this blog post – I'm betting something vaguely Kafkaesque will unfold – but who knows?
A friend of mine tried to post a comment to my blog, and says he received the error message "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". This is a pretty weird error message. Is Typepad doing semantic analysis of comments to determine philosophical viability? I hope not.
I trust that my friend isn't making this up.
Can you please tell me if your code, somewhere, is programmed to output such an error message? If so, could you please explain what sort of context such an uninformative error message might be acceptable? Or alternately, recognize some kind of easter egg or deny the existence of such program code?
Thank you
~jared
NOTA
Here is a copy, pasted after the "======", of my facebook conversation with my friend, in which he told me about the error. It also summarizes some steps I took to try to replicate the problem.
=======
Tony – hi Jared, tried to post a response on your blog and received the message, "Sorry, we can not accept your idea". Sadly, I wasted a half hour on it 🙁
o
Jared Way –
Damn! I hate that kind of thing. I will try to investigate: my best guess – the blog host has some kind of length-limitation on comments, and doesn't have a very user-friendly response to overly long ones.
I will also post your comment to… my blog host's help forum. That's a very strange wording for an error message – did it really say "cannot accept your idea"? How does it know what your idea was? Definitely weird.
o
Tony – Yes, that was the message. Sorry to be the bringer of bad news
o
Jared Way –
Argh. Well, I think I ruled out the "length-limitation" idea – I posted a cut-n-paste of a 20 page article as a test comment and it went thru fine.
I tried making mistakes with the "captcha" and that didn't give that error, either.
I will see if my blog host has anything to say. Not optimistic, however.
o
Jared Way – One more error test: I pasted a vast document of nonsense and URLs (simulated spam) into a comment box. No complaint – with the correct catcha, it didn't error out. The blog host simply ignored the whole thing. Typical "black hole" database consistency error.
I have adopted the term "glass brain" for the increasingly common phenomenon of living one's life quite publicly on the internet. Perhaps this is parallel to the idea of living in a glass house, but without the house – just a brain that anyone can look into. See also, "el licenciado vidriera" – one of my favorite of Cervantes' short stories, which deals with a man who came to believe he was made of glass.
Actually, one can manage one's transparency fairly effectively, for the most part. If one is careful, which I try to be. Thus, a great deal of "me" is "out there" in the online world, but it's a pretty-carefully-managed "me" (seasoned with equal doses of sly circumspection and passive-aggressive snarkiness). I can hide a great deal behind a façade of abstruse vocabulary and sheer volume of apparently random, pseudo-academic, semi-autobiographical blather.
Nevertheless, I've taken what feels like a big step further in the direction of this "managed transparency," recently: I've submitted this blog to a list called the Korean Blog List. Apparently the link "went live" sometime in the last 24 hours, because already I've noticed several incoming links.
…And so, behold, after blogging for 5 years (and intensively – daily – for 3 years), I've suddenly made a move which may render this blog much less of a "just for friends and family" than it has been, to date. We'll see.
Regardless… To my friends and family: I still view you as my primary audience. If others are "listening in" that's great. Perhaps they'll derive some entertainment or insight. To those listening in: this is not an effort at journalism. It's only journaling. I reserve the right to make stuff up and leave stuff out. I exist at the center of my own subjectivity, fully aware of that limitation.
Caveat lector: read at your own risk. Remember the line at the top: "재미없으면 보상해드립니다!" ("If it's not fun, we give a refund!") – this is clearly meant ironically, since there's no charge to read this. Guaranteed refunds on free blogs consist solely in the readers' ability to deftly navigate away from said blogs. If it's not fun, stop looking.
A rant.
I have a facebook account. Which I use, more and more. Living out there in front of the world, in a glass brain.
And I have several other facebook accounts – set up, somehow, in ways I can't quite recall – linked to other email accounts. Because I have so many email accounts (jaredway@basicallywhateveryoucanthinkof). And facebook doesn't make it easy to de-link and/or kill those other accounts. I mean really kill them, as opposed to just "deactivate" them, which seems to mean basically nothing at all, except that you stop receiving email notifications.
It would be nice if facebook set things up so it would be easier to just link everything together. I mean… they do have some options in this domain, but only if you haven't already set things up in some other, unlinked, way. There's no "unsetup this clusterf엌" option. So… there are those other facebook identities out there, that I do nothing with, and try to pretend don't exist. But they murmur, cloyingly, in the back of my head sometimes.
And now, I've been doing some recreational adminning on my blog, and suddenly my blog has its own, separate facebook identity, too – as of today. Hmm. How is this going to work. How do I tell facebook that this CAVEAT DVMPTRVCK identity is really just another version of me? Where's the "yo – Zuckerberg, you freakin asshat – this is me" button?
At this rate, I could become a whole social network on my own, without ever interacting with another person. Hmm… I wonder how often this occurs, out there in the interwebs world? I'm going to "like" myself, sixteen ways to Sunday!
I use a website called feedjit to monitor the traffic to my blog – I’m not sure why, it’s not like this is a commercial undertaking. It’s just fun, I guess, to see who’s coming to my site. I rarely get more than 30 visitors a day, and the average is about 15. More than half of these are people who know me: family, friends, etc. The most popular websearches that lead to strangers actually visiting my blog are: “뭥미 meaning”, “some people swore that the house was haunted” and “korea visa run.”
According to feedjit, I recently had a visitor from the Vatican. I don’t know anyone in the Vatican. But it’s just funny: “hey, the Pope reads my blog.” Not likely – maybe some bored low-level functionary priest, or a tourist with a good internet connection.
