Month: November 2006

I am trying to make some awsome forum cats. What do you think

There is an idea out there that the Aqua Teen Hunger Force is a show for stoners. While very funny, the show is ultimately understood as lowbrow. I wholeheartedly disagree with this understanding of the show. In all honesty, I have found some serious pearls of wisdom in the aqua teens.

In one episode Carl and Mastershake had gone in havsises together to purchase themselves a mail order bride from Chechnya . Naturally hilarity ensued but there is this moment of clarity that Carl has. During the wedding ceremony, between a man a woman and a milkshake, the priest has dificulty pronouncing the bride’s name. At which point Carl tells him “It don’t matter, none of this matters.” Of course a wedding is supposed to matter, and while splitting your mail order bride wedding with your antagonistic Milkshake of a neighbor clearly would devalue the ceremony one would think that at least something about the incident mattered to Carl…

But therein lies the point. In that moment of Zen like calm and brevity Carl offered us all a timeless piece of wisdom. The absurdity of his situation reminds us of the absurdity of our own situation. What are you upset about, what is really getting to you, as my good friend Dan would often quip, “sometimes its hard… living in America.” Consider that I play a video game where people get into massive arguments and get all fired up about virtual shiny swords. Or that people sometimes die when people celebrate the victory of some sports team , or that people strap bombs to themselves and go blow up other people because they have different views on the nature of the flying spaghetti monster. All the while other people die of starvation while we throw away half of our food it goes on. These are things that matter, but they don’t occupy our minds, and I am not saying we should aspire to be saints here, but we should at least aspire to perspective on the state of things.

The way he said it is not to dismiss all meaning, but instead to question the value of that meaning. Clearly he was caught up in a particularly absurd series of events but it only reinforces the need to reexamine your own situation to consider what does hold meaning for you and whether or not it actually should matter. When I watched this episode for the tenth time, after I had laughed Carl’s words still stuck with me. When it all seems so bogus, when I wonder what the point is. I just remember “It don’t matter… none of this matters”

We shall see friends, only time will tell!

…but You tube saved me…

I was watching The Simpsons today and Homer, as usual, said something that made me think. In the episode, he is really nervous about something and tells the person next to him that his stomach is filled with “vomitting butterflies”.

I think we all now that feeling. Your about to give a speech, or go to an interview, or walk past a person you really like and your stomach is flopping around all crazy. I remeber feeling that way clearly when I first flew into Washington DC back in June for my job interview. That morning, I had to get up at 4am to make my flight. I hardly ate a thing. Flying makes me a little queesy as it is. As I sat in my first ever suite going to a job interview for a dream position halfway across the country, I looked down on the colonial homes lining the Potomac and though- what the heck am I doing!? I wanted-no-needed to scream or laugh or something on this airplane filled with this unfamiliar business crowd. I had no access to a phone to talk to anyway and ask for that last little bit of silly assurance that the world would not need a wheelchair to take me out of the interview because I managed to put both of my feet into my mouth.
…but of course I talked myself down and stayed cool and enjoyed the company of the people who eventually became my co-workers. It was fine. On the flight home, nerves were no issue.

I thought of it again recently because I gave two pretty big, imporant presentations in front of people. I got a little nervous but remembered, I’ve done this before, it will be fine. And it was.

It strikes me as something that must happen with age- you get older and you can’t get nervous as much anymore. You’ve already written a history of getting past life’s little queesies. The butterflies stop vomitting….slowly they stop even fluttering. You just end up with some butterflies shrugging..saying…eh….you’ll get through this.

This has provided hours of joy to me.
Here are highlights:

First off

Reading Rainbow is still the best.

Second, So I received my first pay check. Which further substantiates the notion that I have a job. It felt good, strange since I really have not done much of any work, but good none the less. Side note, the mac chess game is fantastic, albeit very difficult. I have been devoting a hour to it a day and cant really kick the difficulty much further than the weakest. It just out thinks me at every turn.

I am waiting to hear back about the atomic heritage foundation thang, which would be the coolest job eva, so keep your fingers crossed for good whammies!

Note: this was posted on a strange satirical blog I set up. I’ve moved it here for save keeping but be forewarned that it is purposefuly total nonsense. 

Culture is at a crossroads. With the textual and intertextual relationships problemitizing our social discourse it is essential that like minded individuals bind together. Not unlike grasshoppers, and praying manti, awaiting the digital/dialectical second coming. As avatars give shape to the mimetic nature of our age so we too join together in this blog circle to ‘bear’ witness.

Abstract:
Social cognition is a captivating issue, one embedded in the cultural tapestry, fabric if you will, of our evolving society. The following is a brief outline of my groundbreaking work. In short, I have figured it out. What you ask? That is precisely the question. When we pull on the outer threads of this tapestry, we may well tempt the fates that weave the stories. Thus the central tenant of my thesis is to name the unnamed. Unmask the phantom, the eight hundred pound gorilla that has kept us from peering into the place of man.

Before it is possible to name this “beast” it is essential to uncover the nature of a peculiar effect, or more correctly affect. As Shrodenginger demonstrated in his simplistic calculations, the is of identity is no longer sufficient cause to categorize the ought of the social organism. In one swift movement of a pen he forever shattered our Kantian illusions of social semblance.
Here, luckily, we can turn to the insightful work of David Absalom, his neo-postfuturist paradigms give us a new means to problemitize our standard ‘space, place’ dichotomy. In short, using his critical studies approach I have deduced what I refer to as “The Liminality Affect”

Allow me to digress into explaining the nature of this affect. I assure you that while it is rather complex it is not beyond the comprehension of your average intellectual. Please, as I describe the latticework of interconnections involved in this thesis, follow along on the concept map on the following page.
As many recent sociologists have noted the study of society begins in the study of cultural forms, I call them cultural products But as I have noted previously, and has been widely accepted, the semiotics of cultural products is squarely based in four functions, The intertextual, the hypertextual, the transtextual and the supertextual. All of these relationships follow the structualist impulse, namely tying pieces of substance, of essence, to cognitive activities. As an aside, it is fascinating that the harmony of the four Aristotelian causes is reiterated here.
With this established it is quite plausible, if not absolutely necessary to see how these signs and signifiers project on to the signified, namely the conception of metaphor. Metaphor, as I see it, is the thread, which hems the pants of our society. With out it our cuffs would drag on the ground and look none too civil.

Now I understand this is a lot to take in. It is probably worth rereading the previous paragraphs several times before we continue. However, we have yet to arrive at our desired Affect, namely the Liminality Affect. So I must press on. Moving to the bottom right of the diagram you will see what I refer to as the tie fighter effect, named thus because of its appearance, looking much like a tiefighter. Yet the name has a deeper significance. For the Social Construct is in effect the lace, which crochets its four constituent parts together. As you can see Race, Place, Space, and Interface interact in mutual connectivity with the social construct in effect becoming the social construct.

As you can now see, quite clearly, these are the particles that make up the chemicals, which make up the elements of our society. It is as a polymer, of earth fire wind and water that we have communed with the ultimate liminality of our universe. How fascinating that this alchemical explanation, which failed in the natural sciences should ultimately be the saving grace here in the social sciences.

It:
Now that we have covered that it is possible to move on to the task at hand, to demonstrate the proof of the existence of a ‘figure’, in effect the affect becomes the slide rule which allows for the justification to enter in to the high temple. Where, we can now tear the curtain in two and recognize our place with in the fabric of this social organism.

As before it is crucial that you follow along in the diagram. For language often fails us inn these matters, and when one is attempting to map a seven dimensional theory with pen and paper it is essential that he take everything he has to do so as carefully and clearly as possible.

We begin in the upper right hand corner, what is the nature of the cognitive? A question that has plagued theorists from the dawn of thought. As Edward Anthony’s work with the indigenous of Polynesia has demonstrated, as counterintuitive as it may seem, thought is diametrically opposed to the notion of culture. The two converge in a flash, at the dawn of the Paleolithic, in what can only be explained in terms of the either or of space and place. These concepts, or more clearly, precepts become the building blocks for the metaphoric tower of bable, which has become known as discourse studies.

The platonic form, which constitutes our metaverse, has, in recent years, been encapsulated in a microverse, namely the Internet. As an outgrowth of the tecnoscientific culture of “emergence” which has come to the foreground in the later twentieth century we now have the tool kit to piece together the substrata of our civilization, and thus all civilization. When you consider the actions of Dinobot, who produced the machinama “Druid Revelation” it becomes obvious that the call form the forum, demands a quorum to innervate all.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, and the other side of our chart, the Zapatistas are struggling under the weight of the failures of social control, social justice and the nature of the corporate hierarchy. All of this points to only one truth, that there is no “way of being in the world” in effect, or affect, we have disreputed the nature of discourse studies at their kirkergardian roots.

It becomes so painfully obvious, when we consider the actions of dinobot in conjunction with the advent of techno in a world where the daily injustices faced and perpetrated by and on the Zapatistas that the Kirkegaradian notion of a way of being in the world has been perverted in the Nietzchian farce. We are no longer “poets of our own lives” we are ruled by the social forces which function as the hydra, fortuitously foretold in the revelation of john. Don’t confuse what I propose, I have not, come to Jesus, but instead he as come to me. I am a witness for the nature, power and glory of my own thoughts, and their stunning clarity and brilliance demand a higher being, or entity, namely, myself.

That, is in fact the worlds largest boot