Barretta

Happy Bloomsday, dudes and chicks! I would post a relevant quotation, but screw that, too busy...

Sun, 16 Jun 2013 14:49:00 -0400

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

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:48:00 -0400

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...

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 15:54:19 -0400

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.

"He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but..."

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 12:01:18 -0400

“He knew in advance what O’Brien would say. That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better. That the party was the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others. The terrible thing, thought Winston, the terrible thing was that when O’Brien said this he would believe it.”

- George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Poster for Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, an adaptation...

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 12:56:31 -0400

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...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:26:26 -0400

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”...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 01:34:04 -0400

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...

Wed, 29 May 2013 21:34:19 -0400

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.

"Pre-college creative writing seems to be a sort of group therapy — gush out your feelings and nobody..."

Wed, 29 May 2013 15:42:42 -0400

“Pre-college creative writing seems to be a sort of group therapy — gush out your feelings and nobody can criticize them because you’re being “creative.” Nobody teaches you the bones of the language. Nobody teaches you forms. Imagine trying to learn to play violin if no one taught you pitch and fingering, if you never practiced. But that’s what we do to children.”

- Alan Levinowitz, “Politics, Art, and the Practice of Writing: A Conversation with Orson Scott Card” (via millionsmillions)

"Morozov writes: “… Silicon Valley innovators […] are the same people who are planning..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 20:30:11 -0400

“

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.

”

- I am going to admit that I skimmed this piece by Maria Bustillos in The Awl, for lack of time, though by the time this queued post publishes on my blog I likely will have returned to it. But it seems worth reading in full just for these paragraphs, where she neatly thrusts a dagger directly into the heart of Evgeny Morozov’s internet pessimism.

The Heart and Soul nebulae, in infrared false color, courtesy of...

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:30:25 -0400

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.

Thu, 16 May 2013 09:40:53 -0400

That is one hell of a haircut.

The Heart nebula, in a false-color infrared image, courtesy of...

Wed, 15 May 2013 20:30:29 -0400

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...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:35:00 -0400

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...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:07:00 -0400

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.

There are always worse things you could do.: Unsolicited and non-exlusive advice to my younger readers

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:08:00 -0400

There are always worse things you could do.: Unsolicited and non-exlusive advice to my younger readers:

amariefox:

walterblakeknoblock:

If you’re deciding about going to college, I implore you to consider the consequences of accruing tens of thousands of dollars of debt. There’s nothing poetic about not being able to sleep because you’ve got $500 less than is needed at the end of the month. Remember that the typical college…

As much as I agree that not everyone should necessarily consider school - for instance, if you wish to go into a trade program (and probably make a lot of money at what you end up doing…)

However, the consequences, today, of not having a college degree of some sort is completely detrimental to your future. A lot on entry level jobs, which you wouldn’t even think require school do. I have seen secretarial positions that want some sort of Bachelor’s degree.

I come from a family where no one went to college and have seen the firsthand effect of what it does to you. You get sort of stuck. I am a first generation college student, graduated with honors, Magna Cum Laude, and the connections I made while in University (not just the skills I adapted) will be with me for a lifetime.

This is just another way to look at it. Sure, a lot of people never use their degree, maybe change their career, but the point is, it serves as a stepping stone - a way to figure out what they didn’t want to do, even. But, at least they have something. You know? Just in case, somewhere down the line, a future employer asks. It is only going to look good, give you some advantage.

One of my best friends I made in University was a fifty four year old woman who blew college off in her youth and lived to regret it. One thing I can say, though, is when she finally did get back into her studies, she was more passionate than everyone I have ever seen.

So that is the key. Find a passion and study it. It can’t hurt.

I don’t know. This is just one differing opinion. What do you guys think?

People telling kids not to get a degree never fails to make me angry. This particular post doesn’t have any more coherent arguments than I addressed previously, but for reference, here’s my previous post on the subject.

Barretta:

I can’t help but be angry whenever I see someone giving a young person advice about how “necessary” or “useful” a bachelor’s degree is. This may be advice largely applicable to Americans (I can’t speak to Europe but I strongly suspect the same), but here, if you have the choice to get an undergraduate degree, and you want to work in any white-collar field, regardless whether that’s as a freelance writer or a journalist or a nonprofit worker, you don’t think about it, you do it.

The student loan debt doesn’t matter, the “life experience” you could get elsewhere doesn’t matter. The number of doors closed to you as a high school degree holder alone is staggering, and that doesn’t even begin to count the advantages that networking and growing contacts in other industries and professions creates. Look, maybe you don’t need a degree to get an article published or become the next Philip Roth, but it is blatantly irresponsible to tell some eighteen-to-twenty-year-old kid that he or she will have just as much a chance of career success, accomplishment, and earning potential without that piece of paper. It is stupid and disregards all the statistical evidence and the realities of the job market.

I don’t know if this originates out of anecdotes about Bill Gates or from some romantic idea of writing the Great American Novel in your basement, but telling someone not to get a degree if they have the opportunity, even if it involves making sacrifices now, is one of the most idiotic things an older person who is supposed to offer guidance can do. The evidence that you are telling them to do something which will result in their earning tens of thousands dollars less a year over the course of their life is overwhelming. Just stop.

Took a walk around the old college campus today. Of particular...

Sun, 12 May 2013 21:35:53 -0400

Took a walk around the old college campus today. Of particular interest is the broken sundial. The inscription sends some serious mixed messages.

Whenever anyone on Tumblr says, “don’t reblog my posts,” I sit back and I wonder...

Sun, 12 May 2013 20:30:33 -0400

Whenever anyone on Tumblr says, “don’t reblog my posts,” I sit back and I wonder what my life would be like if my idea of security was storing classified documents in the Xerox tray.

C’mon. People. There is such a thing as inviting trouble.

Every time I look at my girlfriend I find some new way that she’s gorgeous beyond compare. No...

Thu, 09 May 2013 19:51:44 -0400

Every time I look at my girlfriend I find some new way that she’s gorgeous beyond compare.

No moral or anything. That’s all.

A photochrom of Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia, circa 1901.

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:30:19 -0400

A photochrom of Forsyth Park in Savannah, Georgia, circa 1901.