August 12, 2005
nature's harmonic simultaneous 4-day time cube
I'm doing a little experiment. Have you heard of TimeCube? It's a pretty funny page with large all-caps text talking about an academic conspiracy to make us not realize that everything is based on rules of four (which is odd since cubes should be associated with the numbers 8, 6, and 3—I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why I chose these three numbers). The whole deal, and how it is actually developing a cult following is discussed on wikipedia.
I made a site for picking lottery numbers to see how many hits it gets. In the text for the site I included TimeCube references along with some creative writing, i.e. bull crap.
Here's the link, specially worded to maximize Google PageRank:
Get free, best, winning, lucky lotto, lottery, numbers, using our Time Cube astrology software.
In the process, I discovered Gail Howard's lottery guide, which is hilarious. Here are some sections:
- Tell if a number is about to start a long losing streak before it loses 15 or 20 games or more.
- Know when to play -- or when not to play -- a specific number for a specific drawing.
- See how often you can expect to trap the six, five, four or three winning numbers in your wheeled group
- Tell which "cold" number is best to play. (No, it is not the number out the longest!)
- Detect at a glance which numbers are hot and which are not.
- Avoid playing Lotto numbers that are sure to lose.
- Cash in on the luck of others.
- Eliminate one quarter to one fifth of the Lotto numbers in your state's game and turn a 49-number game into a 39-number game.
- Know how many cold, lukewarm, and hot numbers to include on your tickets.
- Spot a Hot Number before it gets hot -- so you can be on it when it starts its winning streak.
Posted by philipd at 09:05 PM
RFC: content suggestions henybody??
Just curious to anybody that reads this site, as to what content you want to see here. Anything you want me to research, summarize, opine on? Send me an email. I'm curious as to what's on your mind when you come to philosophistry.
Posted by philipd at 05:28 PM
anniversariECHO
TRUMAN (real) AUGUST 6th, 1945
Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T. It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British "Grand Slam" which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare.
The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid many fold. And the end is not yet. With this bomb we have now added a new and revolutionary increase in destruction to supplement the growing power of our armed forces. In their present form these bombs are now in production and even more powerful forms are in development.
It is an atomic bomb. It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe. The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.
Before 1939, it was the accepted belief of scientists that it was theoretically possible to release atomic energy. But no one knew any practical method of doing it. By 1942, however, we knew that the Germans were working feverishly to find a way to add atomic energy to the other engines of war with which they hoped to enslave the world. But they failed. We may be grateful to Providence that the Germans got the V-1's and the V-2's late and in limited quantities and even more grateful that they did not get the atomic bomb at all.
The battle of the laboratories held fateful risks for us as well as the battles of the air, land and sea, and we have now won the battle of the laboratories as we have won the other battles.
NIXON (undelivered) JULY 20th, 1969
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the Moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.
These two men are laying down their lives in mankind's most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding. They will be mourned by their families and friends; they will be mourned by their nation; they will be mourned by the people of the world; they will be mourned by a Mother Earth that dared send two of her sons into the unknown.
In their exploration, they stirred the people of the world to feel as one; in their sacrifice, they bind more tightly the brotherhood of man. In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do much the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
Others will follow, and surely find their way home. Man's search will not be denied. But these men were the first, and they will remain the foremost in our hearts.
For every human being who looks up at the Moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.
Posted by philipd at 01:24 AM | Comments (2)
August 11, 2005
dong.. ba-dong... "wasureardara" "what the hell r they saying?"
it's 2pm, i'm still sleeping because I'm a caveman. working man. no, caveman. no vampire. we're both vampires. my roomate is a vampire. he's from germany, listens to icelandic death metal and eats children for breakfast.
yesterday he placed in my hand a bloody reddish thing. he said it was called taco. Tako. ta-ko. only 2 letters. たこ 鮹 that's japanese for dead babies. it was pretty good.
his name is lukas. or lookas. or lucas. two letters as well: ルカス which is japanese for "ru-ka-su" the u is silent, and it's actually an "l" not an "r", but after douglas macarthur beat up japan, all japanese ... nevermind.
Just go. goooo! just FIVE. ご or "goh" (the h is silent, non-existent, okay I made it up), "goh" is "japanese" for "five" which is the same as V in Roman counting systems.
loookas sez it's just another daily dragging:
boom. dong. dong.
(click pix for full size (in japanese you say, lar-gee si-zee) )
Posted by philipd at 09:56 PM | Comments (2)
August 09, 2005
Lost japan trip info!
ppl think I'm dead because I haven't blogged about my japan trip.
I am not dead. I'm rigorous.
vigor is the key word here. Vigorous.
justronomy.com is where you will find latest pictures, taken by my cousin.
Posted by philipd at 10:40 AM | Comments (0)
August 08, 2005
100 People Who Are Screwing Up America. And Why?
I finished reading Bernard Goldberg's book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America and I have summarized the contents here.
Posted by philipd at 03:27 AM | Comments (3)
August 03, 2005
I <3 Aiko
Posted by philipd at 02:01 PM | Comments (0)
July 19, 2005
Cool video of "Fold n' Drop" Desktop Interaction
This is already covered on slashdot, but check out this demo of fold n' drop, an innovative way to drag objects between windows.
The wow-factor sets in when you view the video (right-click and "save"). Note, you will need DivX installed to play it. If you don't know or care what DivX is, get VLC Media Player, a video player that "just works."
Posted by philipd at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)
July 07, 2005
japang mang
My photo gallery from my July trip to Japan (ongoing)
my frequency of updating posts on philosophistry may decline this month due to me being in Japan. My interest in Japan began last year and I posted a few times about it. I'm here for tourism, to stake out a potential place to live, and to visit my cousin Justin.
Here is a demonstration that occurred on the 7th of July, 2005. War veterans are protesting the prime minister to keep up annual visits to the Yasakuni Shrine, a Shinto memorial for Japanese soldiers, including some war criminals. Koreans and Chinese are against the visits as they view Japan as being complicit in war crimes tantamount to Nazi war crimes. About 300 people there, on the north-south avenue that runs through Tokyo Station.
The gas stations remind me of computer games I played around 1995, mainly ones with flying cars. These gas stations seem Y3K ready, as the flying cars will take advantage of the hanging pumps.
Posted by philipd at 01:22 AM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2005
bump up this GOOG pagerank
UPDATE: I sent Kottke, my favorite blogger, an email and he put up a link. Thanks for the help.
Burtynsky at Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University
We need to get this on the search engines. It's a site I created for an amazing photographer, Edward Burtynsky. His current exhibit in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford shows his landscape photography. The themes are loosely "man's effect on the world."
Burtynsky won a $100,000 TED Award.
Check out the site. We used some wiki and flash-based zooming kung fu to make it happen.
Posted by philipd at 07:06 PM | Comments (2)
June 19, 2005
Wikipedia article on egalitarianism
Yet another gem in wikipedia: wikipedia's entry on Egalitarianism
Posted by philipd at 03:29 PM | Comments (0)
June 17, 2005
The Singularity and the "Prevail Scenario"
UPDATE: I've cross-posted this on futurehi.net where there is a larger discussion taking place. Please post your comments there. Also, I found a deeper manifesto by Lanier wherein he argues against "cybernetic totalism."
I went to a talk by Joel Garreau who just published the book Radical Evolution. The subtitle of the book is "The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—And What It Means To Be Human." The talk and the book are about the radical changes to come amidst a world of limitless technology.
I normally avoid these talks because I have—so I've thought—internalized the interesting perspectives on where the Singularity will take us. Turns out I just only have two extremist views. There's Ray Kurzweil who, in The Age of Spiritual Machines, describes a "Heaven" scenario for mankind, wherein we upload our minds to machines and simulate a paradise of infinite beauty. Then there's Bill Joy who asks: In a world where a million people can make an atom bomb, how do we stop ourselves from self-annihilation? (cf: Why the future doesn't need us). We can call his the "Hell scenario."
Garreau introduces an alternative view titled the "Prevail Scenario," which he ascribes to Jaron Lanier.
The rest of this post is about the Prevail Scenario, pulling quotes from Chapter 6 of Garreau's book.
Continue reading "The Singularity and the "Prevail Scenario""
Posted by philipd at 01:40 AM
June 10, 2005
Did Simone de Beauvoir's scandalous open 'marriage' to Sartre make her happy?
Article about the relationship of a famous philosopher and a famous philosopher-feminist. Sartre pursued his "male prerogative" of multiple partners with minor attachments, while as de Beauvoir transcended her own monogomous leanings (cf: "jealousy") for the philosophical ideal of polyamory and bisexuality.
Posted by philipd at 02:15 PM | Comments (0)
Jason Kottke is a personal inspiration
Jason Kottke is my favorite blogger. He used to be a web designer, but now he is working full-time blogging. While there are thousands of self-sufficient solopreneurs providing content for ad bucks, Kottke is relying solely on donations:
Like I said above, there's got to be a way to support media that doesn't involve advertising. But more than that, I don't want to disrupt the relationship dynamic we've got going here. There are currently two parties involved with kottke.org: me and the collective you. Advertising introduces a third party. In my experience, the third wheel of advertising often works to unbalance the relationship in favor of either the author or the readers (usually in favor of the author). If ads were involved, I might feel the need to change what or how I write to appease advertisers. I might write to increase pageviews and earn more revenue. I could fill pages with ads, earning more revenue but making the content more difficult to read or pushing some content off the page entirely. You could block advertising and deny me needed revenue.None of that is appealing to me. If I'm writing, you're reading, I'm responding to what you've got to say about my writing, and we're mixin' it up in the comments, why do we need a middleman? Why not keep that dynamic intact if we can?
I admire Kottke for setting aside his career for his ideals and passion. So far it has worked out well (about ~$30,000 well). And in the end, I think it will pay off even more handsomely for Kottke, whether through book deals, speaking engagements, or whatever.
Posted by philipd at 02:47 AM | Comments (2)
June 09, 2005
Interesting Statistic about Valedictorians
The New Yorker quotes a study about valedictorians:
... few of the valedictorians seem destined for intellectual eminence or for creative work outside of familiar career paths. Dedicated to the well-rounded ideal—to be a valedictorian, after all, you must excel in classes that don’t interest you or are poorly taught—the valedictorians had “used their strong work ethic to pursue multiple academic and extracurricular interests. None was obsessed with a single talent area to which he or she subordinated school and social involvement.” This marks a difference, Arnold said, from what we know about many eminent achievers, who tend to evince an early passion for a particular field. For these people, Arnold writes, a “powerful early interest evolves into lifelong, intensive, even obsessive involvement in the talent area.” She goes on, “Exceptional adult achievers often recall formal schooling as a disliked distraction.” Valedictorians, by contrast, conformed to the expectations of school and carefully chose careers that were likely to be socially and financially secure: “As a rule, valedictorians relegated their early interests to hobbies, second majors, or regretted dead ends. The serious athletes among the valedictorians never pursued sports occupations. Most of the high school musicians hung up their instruments during college.”
I seem to fit the cast of a general achiever more than that of the single-passion specialist. I've developed skills in sublimating my short-term interests for the sake of long-term goals, such as good grades or expanding my knowledge base. I don't have an object fetish, wherein I can relish in a single field or task. I tried to get into writing for its own sake, but neither the process of writing nor its aesthetic inspires me for long. I found the same is true with my fleeting interests in painting or music.
These two pages are also interesting: Generalist or Specialist? Which do I consult? and Creative Generalist (a blog).
Posted by philipd at 09:44 AM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2005
Organizational Acronym: FAT - "File, Act, or Trash"
To better stay organized, apply the FAT policy: "File, Act, or Trash." Over the years, this policy has served me well; having an empty email inbox is like a breath of fresh air.
I got this tip from a booklet at the grocery store.
Posted by philipd at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2005
Why I left Google
In the middle of March, I began a nine-week career in customer service at Google. I chose customer service because I wanted to try something other than web design. Customer service also deals with communication and people skills -- two of my strong interests. I chose Google in particular because of its great perks and great people.
The perks were phenomenal: free lunches by a world-class chef, five-dollar chair massages, super-stocked snack rooms, on-campus haircuts, on-campus car washes, and a free gym membership. And the people were great too, especially in my department. The female-to-male ratio was roughly 60:40. People were mostly young, smart, and cultured. One of my co-workers double-majored at Stanford in physics and philosophy, and has a taste for jazz and Russian novels. My other co-worker is into all sorts of good music, like the stuff they play at Coachella.
I also developed plenty of respect for the work-related skills of my co-workers. You wouldn't normally think that customer service requires much skill, but Google has high standards for personalized and comprehensive email support. When you rifle through hundreds of emails a day, you learn to quickly intuit user problems and then respond in a way that minimizes follow-up.
As a new hire, most of my time was spent reviewing websites for inclusion into our ad network. Even though the process is fairly mechanical, I didn't get bored. On a daily-basis, I'd discover tricks to improve the efficiency of the process, ultimately giving me a sort of assemblyline high (1). Plus, I felt so integrated with my team that work took a backseat to having fun with co-workers. In summary, the workplace gave me a decent buzz.
But, every four days or so, I'd come home depressed. Google was a major time sink, and my efforts went nowhere meaningful. After putting in eight hard hours, what had I done? Helped move Google's stock a few micro-points? Helped place annoying ads on websites to give webmasters a few more pennies? There are plenty of other ad networks, and Google is a huge, public company -- worth more than $82 billion. Even though I got an assemblyline high, I also felt like a tool.
Working at Google is a commitment of one's life. The little free time you have left barely covers much-needed leisure, relaxation, and socialization. Even though the employees are young and single, they seemed married to work. Where could I find time to soak in new philosophies, develop myself creatively, and engage in new and interesting projects? And only two weeks of vacation per year? Sorry. And Google is not the kind of place you can compartmentalize easily; you can't just punch in your time and expect it to fade away when you get home. Giving 110% is the only sustainable work ethic at Google.
So in the end, I learned that while a great social scene can make drudgery seem bearable, it can't make up for its meaninglessness. And that a full-time corporate job involves incredible personal trade-offs and commitment.
I'm not sure what my next steps will be. For now, I've bought myself some time thanks to freelance web design and my stint at Google. I'm also involved loosely with creative web design for Stanford's MetaMedia Lab. I might do some travelling, but otherwise, everything's up in the air.
[1]: There is a story in the book Flow about a factory-worker who loves his job. He treats himself like an athlete, bringing a stopwatch to work, and tries to optimize the assembly of widgets. His work then becomes more enjoyable as a sport or game
Posted by philipd at 05:56 AM | Comments (7)
It's 5am, why am I still up?
I'm not a big coffee drinker, nor do I drink Coke and Pepsi. I'm also light on the amount of chocolate that I eat. So I guess it surprised me that, on a day that I had been working out, that I'd end up waking up in the middle of the night, at 5am, not feeling sleepy at all.
Which led me to this interesting fact: caffeine takes 6 hours to diminish by half in your body. If I remember correctly, at around 9pm, I had this nice pint (16 oz.) of thai iced tea. Whoops, that'll be the last time I have tea, chocolate, or anything caffeinated near dinnertime.
I've generally been against caffeine. It releases adrenaline which basically what is released when you're under stress. Plus, you get addicted. Then there's my latent ideological attitude toward it: caffeine is proof that someone has sold-out his or her body for the sake of a high-stress lifestyle.
Two weeks into my recent corporate job, I started getting sleepy after lunch, and instead of investigating the matter, I took some tea. This eventually became a regular affair, and I felt guilty about it. Because my thinking has been that if I really enjoy and care about my work, my enthusiasm will give me the requisite energy. Instead, I was compensating my dispassion with a drug to keep me productive. Dispassionate work is stressful enough as it is, but when you throw in caffeine, that's even more stress.
On the other hand, I admit it's nice to find some pleasure and an instant boost to productivity in a cup.
As a side note, this reminds me of this wacko near where I live: Steve Keetz, the anti-caffeine activist.
Posted by philipd at 05:14 AM | Comments (1)
How I organize my buddy list
This is how my AIM buddy list looks like
Four categories:
- People I talk to
- People I talk to sometimes
- People I don't talk to
- People I don't remember
I keep "People I don't remember" in case I do remember them.
The common alternative is to make a folder for different affiliations (i.e. high school, work, college, etc..). Usually, though, this doesn't take advantage of the drilldown menu structure of buddy list.
I usually keep the "people I talk to" open most of the time. And because this isn't many people, it doesn't occupy much space. Also, I frequently slide people in and out of groups.
Posted by philipd at 01:08 AM
June 05, 2005
How to rate songs in iTunes
The standard approach in a 5-star system is to give your favorite songs all 5 stars, and then plain-old "good" songs 4 stars.
I think the better approach is to start with one-star to peg songs in your collection that you think are worth coming back to again. Treat the star as the same as the GMail star, which is just meant to peg an item.
Then, if, you feel that a song is outstanding, only then do you give it a second star. And then, for songs that get repeatedly played, like more than 30 times, then you give it 3 stars.
The point is that, after a year or so, you should only have one song in your entire collection with 5 stars. Then maybe five songs with 4 stars, and like twenty-five songs with 3 stars, and so on, exponentially decaying.
Posted by philipd at 09:42 PM | Comments (1)
June 04, 2005
Someone refutes the historian thoroughly
Paul Meyers goes item-by-item on Rubinstein's "evolution-is-just-a-theory" arguments and refutes them
The most interesting find, for me, was this link to Talk.Origins which has all the creationist claims and their rebuttals.
Posted by philipd at 10:33 AM | Comments (0)
Why Transitional or Ancestral Species Might be Scant in the Fossil Record
UPDATE: I don't feel great about my writing on this article anymore. See the next one for a better discussion.
William D. Rubinstein, a professor of modern history at the University of Wales - Aberystwyth, is claiming that "the theory of evolution is just a theory." His arguments are compelling, but we can come up with even more compelling counter-arguments.
Here is one of his points:
There are actually no "missing links" in the fossil record, a fact which, I understand, is continuously swept under the rug. According to Darwinian theory, such transitional species should have constantly appeared (and keep appearing), yet remarkably few have ever been observed. There are apparently no known transitional fossils in the whole fossil record of the plant kingdom, although millions of fossil plants have been found [Cited in William R. Corliss, ed., Science Frontiers II: More Anomalies and Curiosities of Nature (2004), p. 154]. What the actual fossil record allows us to infer is apparently that entirely new species appear, as it were, fully-formed.
My counter-arguments are as follows:
Continue reading "Why Transitional or Ancestral Species Might be Scant in the Fossil Record"
Posted by philipd at 12:33 AM | Comments (0)
June 03, 2005
About the New Design
Discussion about the new design for Philosophistry.
The Movable Type template for this site was generated from Adobe ImageReady. I used the template tags like <MTEntries> and put them in the slice specifications. There is zero modification of the HTML between the "Save Optimized" command in ImageReady and Movable Type rebuilding my index.
To create the movie, I found an iTunes visualization called eyephedrine. I then used Snapz Pro to record my screen as a quicktime movie. Then I used Flash MX 2004 to turn that into a flash movie.
I like anarchy, and the theme of this funky new design is mis-direction.
I still want the site to be usable, and hence the layout for this series of posts remains fairly vanilla. One of my cousins says that this site is simpler, which I found surprising at first. But then it makes sense, as I have one side of the site for my craziness and separate side for the posts. The posts are immediately visible -- above-the-fold as they say. Also, all the extraneous information, such as contact info, is thrown into a button in the upper left-hand corner.
I mentioned Duchamp before. What I like about Duchamp is not necessarily his Dada tendencies, but his preternatural ability to circumvent norms. This ability is actually innate for the amateur (because he doesn't know any better), and so I borrowed quite a bit from places like geocities and myspace. However, unlike those amateurs, I want to preserve usability.
Also, my normative breaks are not for violation's sake only; in addition to the hilarity of incongruence, there is some purpose to these things. For example, I found that shimmering iTunes visualization just as audacious as any myspace writer finds music videos. Or that choice of a blue color (#0088FF) on the front-front page is one of my favorite colors in web design. Plus, I'm interested in aesthetics, and so I tried to avoid ugliness in the face of disconcordance.
Posted by philipd at 04:28 PM | Comments (2)
May 31, 2005
A Break in Happiology
I've been going nuts with philosophy and psychology for the past week.
One problem that has confounded me, and is actually an unresolved problem in philosophy, is "what to do?" What is it that we ought to do? There are moral models which are relevant in moral dilemmas. And then there are models your parents or peers tell you, things like "make money" or "pursue your dreams."
For awhile, happiology has been my personal imperative. However, I'm finding serious flaws with it.
For three years, my belief has been that one ought to do "whatever makes them happy." My justification for this belief has been the seeming irrefutability of happiology. The following mock-conversation is a battle between happiology and a money-imperative:
Donald Trump: "I don't pursue happiness, I pursue money."
Phil: "why?"
Donald Trump: "Because money buys me the things I want, such as material goods, and pretty women."
Phil: "And why do you want to get these things"
Donald Trump: "Because they make me happy."
Happiology appears to have won, and it will win against every imperative using similar lines. i.e. "Q: Why would you want to be moral then? A: because it makes me happy." However, if we continue the conversation, we find the contradiction dissatisfying:
Phil: "So then, don't you actually care about happiness?"
Trump: "no."
I've always been aware of this contradiction throughout my subscription to happiology. However, I had justifications that seemed to explain this phenomena. One explanation is that modeling objectives based on things that relate indirectly to happiness may be more cognitively efficient than focusing on happiness directly. Another explanation is that happiology-as-framework may not be evolutionarily beneficial, or that personal happiness doesn't correlate with group success.
But then I found a similar contradiction in myself. I've measured my happiness before, and what I've noticed is that there's also this hidden X-variable: my attitude toward my happiness. I've been very unhappy for long periods of time, while simultaneously not caring that I was unhappy. Some would suggest, as does my friend Zack, that then "you were not really unhappy."
In which case, happiness has a dual meaning. On the one hand, happiness can mean, "do you have it, whereby it is that thing you are to be striving for." In which case, happiness is a meaningless term. It might as well be paraphrased as "are you getting what you want to get."
Happiness can also just mean feeling happy. In this definition, happiness is reduced to an emotion. Achieving this emotion doesn't have to be the grand imperative: one can live the "right" life without ever feeling that sense of happiness. That happiness-sensation could just not be important to you.
In which case, the conversation with Donald Trump is not a contradiction, for there is a happiness ONE and TWO. Happiness couched in my language was "do you seek that really great feeling of being happy?" while as his happiness was couched in terms of "these things matter to me, therefore having them makes me happy."
Later in my subscription to Happiology, my apathy toward happiness had to be taken seriously. This realization has brought an imperative-crisis because "if I don't care about happiness, what am I to do???" Sartre offers an annoying answer which is "you invent" what to do. i.e. you just make it up, and wherever your actions lead you to is what you were seeking all along.
Pfft. This is a dissatisfying answer, as it's the equivalent of saying, "do whatever."
But, I'm currently leaning toward an imperative of "do whatever's on the table." If you are in a moral dilemma, let's say, then morality will be at stake, and so focus in on that. If you are in a relationship, then how you deal w/ love will be what matters. If you are single and enterprising, then making money or self-actualization will be what matters.
And doing what matters is all that matters, right?
PS. I quit my job at Google recently, and this has afforded me the time to contemplate these kind of things.
Posted by philipd at 01:38 AM | Comments (3)
May 27, 2005
the undefined
be the undefined, the undefined is the message, the message.
Posted by philipd at 08:34 PM | Comments (0)
Blogosphere, guide me
A writer for the Guardian spent 48 hours in New York City, armed with just his cellphone and blackberry. His goal, to use the whispers in the dense NYC blogosphere as his guide. Turned out to be a fairly eclectic trip with visitations to a pencil-shaped restaurant, a famous cemetary, and an underground literary barscene.
Why didn't I think of this?
Posted by philipd at 08:05 PM | Comments (0)
my pasinos?
creativity, ideation, vision, invention, architecture, elegance, aesthetics, progress, modernism, depth, breadth, eclectic, variety, flow.
Continue reading "my pasinos?"
Posted by philipd at 11:20 AM | Comments (0)
May 26, 2005
Wes Anderson and the Problem with Hipsters
Money is a funny thing with hipsters. They exist in a state of perpetual luxuriant slumming. They drink blue-collar beers but hold white-collar jobs. Or vice versa. Whether he comes from above or below, the hipster takes care never to appear to be striving. Class anxiety isn’t hip. There’s something utopian about the trucker hat. But of course the hipster couldn’t afford to dress down if there weren’t a taut social safety net in place. Debt relief from mom or dad might be just a phone call away. Then there’s that steady freelancing gig that’s always there when you need it, no matter how distasteful it might be to proofread ad copy or put on that catering uniform. And let’s not forget that guy you can count on. His star always burned a bit dimmer than yours, but it never burns out. Perhaps he wears glasses, but without irony. There’s something weird about his apartment—it’s nice, not squalid. You may not talk to him much anymore—he’s not in your crowd, not hip enough, I guess, but loyal, and responsible, still holding down the same basically shitty job. He’ll always bail you out or put you up. -- http://www.nplusonemag.com/neato.html
Sounds a lot like me.
(CF: wikipedia's entry on "hipster")
Posted by philipd at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)
May 25, 2005
more ridiculous marketing craziness
While you were stuck in your crappy institutional high school trying to find a way to sneak out during study hall, some rich kid up the street was spending his days in ivy covered halls taking classes like Depression Era Economics and the Rise of Fascism. Not only was he rich, but he was classically good looking, smart and he managed to be a natural athlete as well. He probably didn’t play football but he was captain of his school’s soccer or lacrosse team. You rode bikes around the hood together or played baseball up at the local park, but he lived in a different world than you. He came from a long line of rich, sturdy people, and good genetics has blessed him with smarts, looks, athletic ability and ostensibly a bright future. He was the golden boy, he could do anything well and so people expected more from him.
The Sony Ericsson S710a is that golden boy.
link
Posted by philipd at 03:36 PM | Comments (2)
May 21, 2005
nomor and only
No more reading, no more writing.
No more bookmarking, no more blogging.
only seeing, only feeling. only tasting, only pleasure.
no more analysis, no more shift key. no more focus, only wander.
no more revisions, no more proofing. only the urge, only the release, only the spirit, only the gist.
no more final hours, no more single-man combat.
only light jabs, only love.
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stress rules everything around me. everything is an act, a moment of focused elan. i have disciplinitis.... my actions are all directed and organized with laser-like intensity. My health problems have all the symptoms of someone stressed out.
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Posted by philipd at 07:57 PM | Comments (0)