|
|
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on August 22nd, 2010%
I’ve done my laundry today.
In packing to come to France, I had to pack only what I needed. It was confirmed that there was a laundry room in the building, so that meant I could carry less, and worry less about having to truck laundry around a new city.
Then it came down to the question: what do I pack?
Far beyond the simple question of the ideal blank forms of things I’m going to need (so many each of shirts, underwear, socks, pants), the question really revolves around a much deeper point: who am I going to appear to be?
Perhaps it is inevitable that I feel some nostalgia now, with less than a week left in this town that has been my home for three and a half months. It’s not all been good — often quite stressful and frustrating, actually — but I’m trying to take what gems I can from it all, see what of myself I have learned or how I might have changed, see what of the world I have learned or experienced.
And yet, it was while going down to get my laundry out of the dryer that I had this more interesting thought: what does my laundry say about me?
Continue reading A Self-Portrait in Three T-Shirts
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on August 3rd, 2010%
 Man's Mechanics Exposed How does life become complicated? Why does it happen? How do we fix it?
These questions occur to me once and a while. I’m not always lucid enough to remember just how complex life is — or perhaps I’m blithely unaware of it.
In either case, I think I prefer those times when it does occur to me, because it also highlights my own problematic patterns. And when a problematic pattern is highlighted, you can address it. Its visibility is its weakness, as you can change or slay that which you see.
In this case, there are a couple of patterns that come to mind. First, I have a great desire to learn things. Not quite everything, but certainly a substantial list of things. I’m constantly frustrated by my lack of knowledge of history, or the limits to my scientific understanding. Lumped in with this is the desire to explore those great works of fiction and philosophy that inform our society. Not knowing those means a break in the universe, a separation between the foundations of how the world is and the understanding of how it came to be.
Continue reading How Do You Structure Your Life?
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on July 18th, 2010%
I continue to find myself frustrated, annoyed and frequently, screamingly mad at the inexcusably and inexplicably blocked Internet service here. I can find no rhyme nor reason behind it, and my emails go unanswered.
I’ll keep sending them, see if anything happens. With each one, I send the increasingly longer list of improperly blocked sites, and my introduction to the email gets a bit wordier, and perhaps a bit less civil.
The only trend that I can really see so far is the alarming number of news sites that are blocked. I mean, I can understand blocking YouTube, by why block The New York Times? The LA Times? The Daily Gleaner??
(Curiously, the don’t block the ultra-picky Gleanerisms criticism site..)
Interestingly, I haven’t found a French newspaper that has been blocked yet. If I didn’t know better, I would be tempted to assume some basic bigotry on the part of the ISP/lodging host. However, as the old saw goes: “never assume malice where simple stupidity will suffice”. Or, in this case: “massive stupidity”.
I’ve been glad that neither the CBC nor (most of) Google seems to be blocked yet, and Twitter has been my regular lifeline to friends, now that Flickr, Libsyn and incredibly Feedburner . . . → Read More: Dispatches From Behind The E-Curtain: Where the Hell is Canada?
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on November 27th, 2009%
I’m not exactly keeping up on the forefront of all knowledge, or all cool things. In fact, there are too many things to even keep up with the popular ones, let along the more esoteric and odd things.
Hmm.. I don’t blog often enough, given that I feel like, at the moment, I could write and write and write on a totally irrelevant matter, all as a long-winded introduction to a web-comic that I have just devoured (or which just devoured me!): Lovecraft Is Missing.
I am an HP Lovecraft fan, to be sure: his work is evocative, totally odd, bizarre in its perspective, antiquated, difficult to read but easy to appreciate. Lovecraft inspired a large segment of modern horror, and created the notion of cosmic horror, so much as I know. His horror saw the world and all that we know (and can know) about it as just one tiny fragment of a larger cosmos, and that one form of true and devastating horror was the realization that it is not that what you know is wrong, just painfully incomplete, and that vast intelligences have existed for millenia and would regard us as nothing more than servants at best, ingredients . . . → Read More: A Comic to Gnaw At Your Brain: Lovecraft Is Missing
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on July 27th, 2009%
I frequently and with great abandon tell anyone who will listen about any idea that crosses my mind. (Most often, that comes from Twitter. Go ahead, follow me, but make it known that you are human or I’ll bounce ya.)
It’s not that I don’t have any internal censors, or even think the ideas are necessarily all that good.
It’s that they need to go out there.
You see, there is a movement in the incorporated culture of capitalist ideals that seems to insist that ideas be owned by someone, that they need to be controlled and made into money-generating solidity in order to really be valuable.
Maybe they’re right, I dunno.. I have been recently heavily influenced by reading the Charlie Stross book Accelerando. I haven’t finished the book yet, so I really shouldn’t allow the pervasive ideas in their to wash over me and change my thinking so much, but I have..
Actually a lot of the ideas feel very familiar to me. I’ve been reading very odd books for quite a while, although most of the reading I’ve done in the last several years has been widely separated in time and complexity. I’ve collected far more of them over the . . . → Read More: Giving away Ideas..
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on January 30th, 2009%
Thoughts and musings on the event that was Podcamp Halifax. I brought with me extra baggage that I probably didn’t need, both mental and physical.
Overall, it was a success, but I didn’t get out of it what I wanted — in part because I didn’t put into it what I needed.
Oh, and I play waay too much Spider . . . → Read More: WOL003: #podcamphfx
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on January 15th, 2009%
What’s this? Another random, top-of-my-mind podcast? Yes, it is!
I can’t really sleep right now, so I’ve decided to unburden my thoughts and simply spew them forth into the podosphere.
Do I regret it? I dunno.. Regrets are for the morning after, and it’s still the night before.
I’ve added a slight theme song to the ‘cast, this week, and renamed it. Who knows – I might do that every time!
The theme song was a song I fell in love with immediately, because it echoes my blog subtitle and this episode: “Things That Keep Me Up At Night” by Beatnik Turtle, as heard on their wonderful Song of the Day podcast. I’ve enjoyed many of their wonderfully creative songs, and was pleased to get permission to use this one in this ‘cast. It’s a little clipped in this episode (roughly abused, really), but I’ll refine my usage of it in the future, and put the whole song in the feed at some point for people to listen to.
The name change is a suggestion by a Twitter-friend named “haavoc“, whose tweets are often very wry comments about the absurdity of modern day life and working environments. I’m glad he gave me this idea, . . . → Read More: WOL002: top -n 10 -o cpu -l 1
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on January 7th, 2009%
So, here it is: a threatened “blathercast”. Nothing really to it, just trying something out. A distraction from ankle pain, really.
Oh, there’s something about region purchases and global economies and such, but it’s all rather half-baked and scattered. Incoherent. Mostly just as a distraction.
Maybe I’ll do another one.. someday. Maybe I won’t.
Yet, it still took me almost 13.5 16 minutes to say nothing. Gift of gab? I don’t know if I’ll call it a gift.. 
*bump* Hopefully, this will get the thing noticed . . . → Read More: WOL001: Inequity and ankle pain.
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on January 6th, 2009%
… and I feel old today.
My right ankle has become stiff. It’s an odd thing, probably related to arthritis, but not (I think) related to my ongoing battle against gout. Gout is an unholy pain akin to having small vices attached to your bones and especially your joints, slowly crushing as miniature pixies of absolute doom cackle.
Well, maybe I’m the only one to hear the pixies.
And this time, I don’t hear the pixies.
Writing this leads me to time, and the intersection of time and information. I debated where I might deliver this information: Twitter, blog post, diary entry, muttered explitive, podcast. While each of these have their obvious differences, the one I highlighted in my mind was a combinatin of immediacy and staying time.
A muttered explitive is instant: you utter it, and then it is typically gone and forgotten. It is an outburst of thought or (more likely) raw emotion, unlikely to have any staying time at all unless you unfortunately had this outburst in the presence of witnesses, and particularly those with fragile conceptions of human behaviour.
Twitter, too, is instant, but has staying power for a few hours. There have been casual comments that I’ve made on this many-to-many instant . . . → Read More: You’re Only As Old As You Feel…
By the Encaffeinated ONE, on January 4th, 2009%
So, the new year has come, and once again I find myself drawn to try to write more, blog more, put more thoughts out there in some form. I’ve thought about just blogging, audioblogging, journalling, diary-making, etc, and have come across a strange dilemma in the form and format of the idea.
Audioblogging is something I’m drawn to, naturally. I do a podcast already, and I’m quite comfortable behind a microphone. It will be strange to do a show which has less structure, but I’m inspired by a bit of advice I heard from David Lawrence (the actor who plays the creepy puppetmaster, Eric Doyle, on Heroes) when he was interviewed by Heroescast. The advice could be summed up in the general platitude, “Just Do It!”, although it was really about being natural and not really editing.
So, a “blathercast” may be in the making. I was encouraged by my fellow twitterati that there might be some interest in hearing my thoughts. This brings me to another format question: for public consumption, or for private consideration?
I’ve been reading “The Art of Research” recently. I picked the book up after realizing that I really didn’t know what I was doing for my research. I . . . → Read More: Beating on a Drum made of Leatherbound Paper Thoughts
|
|
