Tiskets, taskets, et cetera

This was my final project for art class. The theme of our drawing was supposed to be "FLIGHT." I decided to do a triptic exploring what happens when people attempt to fly. The last panel was originally going to show the person whose viewpoint you are experiencing jumping off the building and plummetting towards the ground, but I decided to go with the less depressing alternative in which the jumper gains the ability to fly. When I tried to express this in the same terms of the first two panels I wasn't positive the black and white captured the feel of the magical event that had just taken place, so I borrowed some pastels to finish up with flair (we had not worked with colors all year so it was kind of a risk).




I had my portfolio review today for Art Class. Apparently my ideas are too far ahead of my style. My "head is moving faster than [my] hands." I ended up with a B+ because I was supposed to be developing technique instead of thinking of interesting methods of representation. I guess that's not so bad. The professor told me it's a lot better than being someone who can draft with amazing precision but has no ideas to instill life into. The solution: get better at art.

Hardy Heron

This is Nina from West Jersey. She's a prostitute by trade



OK guys it's time for another geek-oriented post. In honor of Ubuntu's latest release coming out tomorrow, I've compiled my own little top ten eleven list of reasons you would want to switch to Ubuntu 8.04

1. You spilled coke on your apple key and just don't want to deal with it any more
2. You can have conversations with Computer Science majors that completely alienate everyone around you
3. You have a lot of spare time on your hands and nothing to do with it
4. Text based interface trumps graphical interface any day of the week
5. You're not really interested in running "mainstream" programs
6. You're broke
7. You want to meet all the friendly new people that hang out in Linux support forums
8. You can use Kernel panics as an excuse for handing in the occasional late paper
9. No one can ever accuse you of supporting a giant corporation
10. You want to become really familiar with the names of every single component and driver that make up your system as you spend hours online hunting them down
11. Feel better than all the people you hear asking questions like "Wait, what's see-plus-plus?"


Convinced?

Download Hardy Heron right here:
http://www.ubuntu.com/

A dead art form

It's recently occurred to me that there are no new jokes being circulated in my culture. Which is not say that comedy is dead, or that everything has stopped being funny lately. I'm not talking about Chuck Norris jokes or Saturday Night Live. I mean the witty question-and-answer gags or those absurdist anecdotes. I haven't heard a new one in ages.

Two drums and a cymbal fall down the edge of a cliff

Budump-chsh

I'm assuming you've heard this one, probably more than once. Why then has no one invented a single new joke (to my knowledge) in years? I feel like a good number of jokes originated from screenwriters who would put them in their scripts to break up a tense scene or to give a character a different dimensionality, and they would then spread as an oral tradition among the moviegoers' friends and their friends. I have a few suspects for the death of this idea:

1. Joke books. People who were incapable of being funny on their own in social situations would buy these things and study them like textbooks before going to a party or something. "Oooh look how funny you are" the partygoers would say and the joke distributor would get a little boost in self-esteem. These books were super-popular in the seventies and eighties, but then people realized that you can make limited profit selling joke books, so publishers just started compiling a bunch of used jokes instead of writing new ones to make money.

2. Gilbert Gottfried. Most stand-up comedians do not use the joke form I've described in their acts. "Something funny happened inside my brain when I was stoned" (Mitch Hedburg); "Boy the news sure is funny, aint it?" (Jay Leno); or "I can make funny noises with my lips" (Dane Cook). Gilbert Gottfried was always classicist joke-teller though. His forms followed the structure I've described above, but he always pushed the envelope beyond what could be told in general social settings. This is actually not solely Gottfired's fault. Jokes will just not spread as easily when they involve sexual organs or stereotyped demographics. Every time anyone hears a joke like this and says "I find that offensive," the joketeller and all those listening are discouraged from telling that joke again, which I think subconsciously discredits the medium as a whole.

3. Science. Remember in 2002 when scientist made a survey to figure out what the funniest joke in the entire world was? Whose idea was that? Anyway the winner turned out to be that one about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and that missing tent. I never thought it was that great, but who am I to argue with science? I think a lot of traditionalist joke writers felt the same way. Why write any new jokes if it's always going to come in second place to that damn Dr. Watson joke? Thanks a lot objectivity.

In the beginning was the word

"As living information the plasmate travels up the optic nerve of a human to the pineal body. It uses the human brain as a female host... in which to replicate itself into its active form"
--Philip K. Dick
VALIS



Information perpetuates itself the same way viruses do, using living organisms as hosts, and diffusing hierarchically. Once we become infected with a particular idea, it makes a nest for itself in our thoughts, reproducing and occasionally mutating until it can find a new host.

The idea reproduces by sending out reproductions of the original information contagiously to the people we come in contact with--either directly, through academics or conversation, or by creating new hosts for this idea through books, films or other boxes of representation.

The lifespan of ideas is much longer than that of physiological viruses; in an individual this spans anywhere from a couple of years to one's entire lifetime, depending on the strength of the idea. In social or cultural organisms (i.e. nations, civilizations) strong ideas have been known to last well over a hundred years (i.e. Romanticism, Protestantism).

College is in this sense a sort of anti-hospital, in which we purposefully infect ourselves with the hope that these ideas may perpetuate and transmit themselves through us into new forms.

There are very few ideas that are benign--accepting an idea into one's system rarely has a nil effect on the host. Whether that idea be feminism or Reaganomics, when the idea has matured into its adult form (capable of reproduction), it will incorporate itself into the full being of the host, including his actions. Some ideas have been known to be fatal (such as suicide, cigarette commercials [now an extinct form], or daredevilism).

It is possible to build up resistance to certain ideas by purposefully vaccinating oneself with an idea that is mutually exclusive with the target idea if an exposure can be predicted beforehand, such as reading Emmanuel Levinas before reading Friedrich Nietzche. Likewise it is possible to nourish an idea by frequent exposure to compatible or complementary ideas, which is why soda machines and snack machines are usually juxtaposed geographically. They are built as cellular agents for the idea of stimulating the taste buds and the idea of microconsumerism. (Man, I could go for a Snickers bar right now. Oh wow, Skittles! I haven't had those in so long. Crap, now I need something to wash all this down with).

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses lists these criteria for a virus:

1. Viruses arose from non-living matter, separately from and in parallel to other life forms.

2. Viruses arose from earlier, more competent cellular life forms that became parasites to host cells and subsequently lost most of their functionality*.

3. Viruses arose as parts of the genome of cells that acquired the ability to "break free" from the host cell and infect other cells.





*This can be read as previous functionality, as in "I can no longer function as an Objectivist after being infected with the idea of Keynsianism"

[Post Script: About half a day after publishing this post, I remember that this is exactly the premise of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. Damn]