Happy Bloomsday, dudes and chicks! I would post a relevant quotation, but screw that, too busy re-reading it.
Two Lists, One of Things My Girlfriend Pretends To Be Infuriated By or Hate, the Other of Things She Is Actually Infuriated By or Hates
PRETEND RAGE/HATE
- My taking an entire day to ambush and pinch the soft inner skin of her arms, sides, and legs until they are black and blue
- My “imitating” her voice as a simpering, hyper-effeminate whine
- My using said voice to mock her daily fears, anxieties, excitements, et cetera
ACTUAL RAGE/HATE
- Loud-talking gossipy women in bars (especially and inexplicably when wearing ostentatious diamond wedding rings)
- My making an exaggerated frown, dropping my jaw repeatedly and bulging my eyes without blinking so as to resemble a repulsive and impassive bearded fish-man, then holding her down and pretending to gnaw at her face
- The novel Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert
- The word “selfie”
SEN. RON WYDEN, D-OREGON: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?
JAMES CLAPPER, DNI: No, sir.
WYDEN: It does not?
CLAPPER: Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.
— Director of National Intelligence’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee, March 12, 2013. Source video.
Poster for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. ”It will have blood; they say, blood will have blood:/Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.”
I have tickets to Neutral Milk Hotel, which has been a dream of mine for 14 years. So screw all of you guys, I guess.
All that is accomplished when a company deems its low-level service staff “associates” or “team members” rather than just calling them by actual, quantifiable job titles is reinforce the perceptions, true or not, that:
- Being “associated” with the company is meaningless and the “team” is an empty concept.
- Since you have no regular or expert function, you’re an essentially a replaceable cog in the works of the machine.
Honestly I’d be deeply embarrassed to call a waitress, short-order cook, or stock boy an “associate.” Those titles all connote skills, of greater or lesser value, but still, skills. Being an associate just indicates you’re the lowest rung on the totem pole.
I have this problem where when I am interested in a subject, I find it really difficult not to speak in full paragraphs, including parentheticals, audible semicolons, em-dashes, and tons of questions. If we’re going to be interested, let’s be interesting while we’re being interested, yes?
I feel like this shouldn’t be a problem, but it turns out when you have complex, nuanced opinions about something, most people would rather jump off a bridge into a sea of Real Housewives Blu-Rays than talk to you about them.
Morozov writes:
“… Silicon Valley innovators […] are the same people who are planning to scan all the world’s books and mine asteroids. Ten years ago, both ideas would have seemed completely crazy; today, only one of them does.”
“Ten years ago” would mean 2003. In fact this vision, and the practical work of digitizing the world’s books, began more than thirty years before that: in 1971, with the late Michael Hart, the founder of Project Gutenberg (who was in no way a “Silicon Valley innovator,” then or ever): he observed that “the greatest value created by computers would not be computing, but would be the storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in our libraries.” By 2003, Project Gutenberg, a free resource for public domain texts, had already digitized and made available over 10,000 books; only a very blinkered observer wouldn’t already have known—for a decade at least—where the project of scanning all the world’s books was headed.
This brought home to me that Morozov does not describe the Internet I know at all. My Internet is not only the Mark Zuckerberg Internet, or the Kleiner Perkins Internet; it’s the Internet of Michael Hart and Brewster Kahle, Aaron Swartz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science and the new Digital Public Library of America, JSTOR and countless public archives and library and museum sites all over the world. It’s the Internet of preservationists and digital humanitarians, of scholars and intellectuals of all kinds.
So it makes no sense to me at all to hear nihilist talk of how “solutionism” is particularly rooted in the Internet. If the Internet were a world, Morozov blithely ignores whole continents, whole oceans, to make his criticisms of certain aspects of one small province—Silicon Valley—and then extrapolate from them to encompass the rest.
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The Heart and Soul nebulae, in infrared false color, courtesy of NASA. It is incredibly unjust to the detail and resolution of this photograph to view it in anything but high-resolution. Click through.
That is one hell of a haircut.
The Heart nebula, in a false-color infrared image, courtesy of NASA. Blue and cyan here represent the wavelengths of light emitted by stars, while red and green represent that same light reflected or re-emitted by hot dust.
Enceladus, sixth largest of the moons of Saturn, courtesy of NASA (by way of Cassini-Huygens). The bright plumes at lower left and center top of the photographs are jets of water ice particles from cryovolcanoes. Yes, a volcano that shoots ice instead of flame.
Sunrise over the South Pacific from the International Space Station, courtesy of NASA. What struck me the most about this picture is the rare glimpse it gives us of our atmosphere, the thick blue band shading to orange and black over Earth. That thin shell of wind, braced by magnetic power, is the only thing which shields us from a thousand varieties of cosmic ray from the predatory void.
