Archive for June, 2009
Ordinary Affects
Ordinary Affects is an exercise, not a fact. I like this very much.
Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world.
Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.
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Harvey Milk : Human Rights Champion
From Wikipedia:
Harvey Bernard Milk (May 22, 1930 – November 27, 1978) was an American politician and the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, as a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Politics and gay activism were not Milk’s early interests; he did not feel the need to be open about his homosexuality or participate in civic matters until around age 40, after his experiences in the counterculture of the 1960s.
Milk moved from New York City to settle in San Francisco in 1972 amid a migration of gay men moving to the Castro District in the 1970s. He took advantage of the growing political and economic power of the neighborhood to promote his interests, and ran unsuccessfully for political office three times. His theatrical campaigns earned him increasing popularity, and Milk won a seat as a city supervisor in 1977, a result of the broader social changes the city was experiencing.
Milk served 11 months in office and was responsible for passing a stringent gay rights ordinance for the city. On November 27, 1978, Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by Dan White, another city supervisor who had recently resigned but wanted his job back. Conflicts between liberal trends that were responsible for Milk’s election and conservative resistance to those changes were evident in events following the assassinations.
Harvey Milk advocated for the fair treatment of all people, consistent with the beliefs of religious peoples such as Christians, Catholics, Jews, Mormons, or anyone else who loves the US for what it originally set out to do: allow its citizens the right to practice and believe how they wish – treat others the way they’d want to be treated – to live and let live regardless of our differences. It is those differences that make this culture a rich one, unrivaled in its depth.
For that, we owe Harvey Milk a respectful nod for helping us to keep this ship of fools off the rocks of prejudice, discrimination and hate even if for just a bit longer.
Cheers to you, Harvey. And thank you.
If you haven’t yet seen Sean Penn‘s brilliant film, Milk, it is beautifully done:
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Walks the walk: Jim Rossignol
Jim Rossignol is an interesting fellow, particularly in the context that he writes in a unique way about gaming and its influence on culture. Not to mention, the trajectory and contrast of his own story against what he writes makes him an authentic source IMO.
I am anticipating the arrival of his book, This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities published by the University of Michigan Press.
Amazon’s product description reads like this:
“In May 2000 I was fired from my job as a reporter on a finance newsletter because of an obsession with a video game.
It was the best thing that ever happened to me.â€
So begins this story of personal redemption through the unlikely medium of electronic games. Quake, World of Warcraft, Eve Online, and other online games not only offered author Jim Rossignol an excellent escape from the tedium of office life. They also provided him with a diverse global community and a job—as a games journalist.
Part personal history, part travel narrative, part philosophical reflection on the meaning of play, This Gaming Life describes Rossignol’s encounters in three cities: London, Seoul, and Reykjavik. From his days as a Quake genius in London’s increasingly corporate gaming culture; to Korea, where gaming is a high-stakes televised national sport; to Iceland, the home of his ultimate obsession, the idiosyncratic and beguiling Eve Online, Rossignol introduces us to a vivid and largely undocumented world of gaming lives.
Torn between unabashed optimism about the future of games and lingering doubts about whether they are just a waste of time, This Gaming Life also raises important questions about this new and vital cultural form. Should we celebrate the “serious†educational, social, and cultural value of games, as academics and journalists are beginning to do? Or do these high-minded justifications simply perpetuate the stereotype of games as a lesser form of fun? In this beautifully written, richly detailed, and inspiring book, Rossignol brings these abstract questions to life, immersing us in a vibrant landscape of gaming experiences.
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Fahrenheit versus Celsius
In my quest to learn to translate between Fahrenheit and Celsius quickly and accurately, I’ve put this handy calculator here to help me and also to enable me to cheat until I can do it on my own. Type a value in either field below and its equivalent will populate the other:
I *borrowed* this bit of javascript code from NOAA so I should thank them appropriately : )
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3G vs 3Gs : Video Comparison
Some of us have been capturing video since the beginning via Cycorder on the 2g. The 3G had little or no differences in its capabilities from the 2G. That isn’t the case with the 3Gs.
First, there is a distinct advantage to the 3Gs due to its frame-rate capabilities. 30fps beats the snot out of 15fps any day of the week under any conditions. Double it!
Since this capability is tied to hardware, in this case the processor in the 3Gs has a significant advantage, in addition to the camera itself being upgraded. The example below shows that the difference is clear.
This demo was put together by iPhoneArena [thanks, man]:
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Douglas Coupland: Generation A
Douglas Coupland’s new book is due in September of this year:
In the near future bees are extinct—until one autumn when five unconnected individuals, in Iowa, New Zealand, Paris, Ontario, and Sri Lanka, are stung. Immediately snatched up by ominous figures in hazmat suits, interrogated separately in neutral Ikea-like chambers, and then released as 15-minute-celebrities into a world driven almost entirely by the internet, these five unforgettable people endure a barrage of unusual and highly 21st-century circumstances. A charismatic scientist with dubious motives eventually brings the quintet together on a remote Canadian island. But their shared experience unites them in a way they could never have imagined.
Generation A mirrors the structure of 1991’s Generation X as it champions the act of reading and storytelling as one of the few defenses we still have against the constant bombardment of the senses in a digital world.
Wind Power Will Save Us All
Wind power has already sparked a clean energy revolution, however, a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science finds that wind power could provide for the entire world’s current and future energy needs.
In order to estimate something like the planet’s capacity for this, researchers first sectioned Earth into areas of ~ 3,300 square kilometers while surveying local wind speeds every six hours. According to the paper, if 2.5 megawatt turbines crisscrossed the planet, excluding “areas classified as forested, areas occupied by permanent snow or ice, areas covered by water, and areas identified as either developed or urban”, this would work. The possibility of 3.6 megawatt offshore wind turbines was also considered, though restricted to 50 nautical miles off the coast and to oceans depths less than 200 meters.
Using this criteria researchers found wind energy could supply not just the world’s energy requirements, but over forty times the world’s current electrical consumption and over five times the global use of total energy needs.
Good news – thanks, Slashdot
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My Body is a Cage : revisited
Win’s voice is nearly shot in this footage taken from Glastonbury in 2007, but the song doesn’t lose any of its momentous meaning:
“My Body Is A Cage”
My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
I’m standing on a stage
Of fear and self-doubt
It’s a hollow play
But they’ll clap anyway
My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
You’re standing next to me
My mind holds the key
I’m living in an age
That calls darkness light
Though my language is dead
Still the shapes fill my head
I’m living in an age
Whose name I don’t know
Though the fear keeps me moving
Still my heart beats so slow
My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
You’re standing next to me
My mind holds the key
My body is a
My body is a cage
We take what we’re given
Just because you’ve forgotten
That don’t mean you’re forgiven
I’m living in an age
That screams my name at night
But when I get to the doorway
There’s no one in sight
My body is a cage that keeps me
From dancing with the one I love
But my mind holds the key
You’re standing next to me
My mind holds the key
Set my spirit free
Set my spirit free
Set my body free
Sirikata : BSD-licensed platform for virtual worlds
Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. The aim is to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds. The team is aiming for an alpha release in Q2 2009 and this video teaser should give us some sense of what to expect.
Exciting stuff.
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Time-lapse
Seems I spend a lot of time shooting, watching and seeking out good examples of time-lapse photography.
It moves me. It puts me in a mindset somewhat more aware of the passing of time. I like the way it makes me feel small. That perspective is something I crave.
Naturally, I like learning more about stuff, for example where this method originated – so, here’s some of what there is to know about it, from Wikipedia:
Time-lapse photography is a cinematography technique whereby each film frame is captured at a rate much slower than it will be played back. When replayed at normal speed, time appears to be moving faster and thus lapsing. Time-lapse photography can be considered to be the opposite of high speed photography.
Processes that would normally appear subtle to the human eye, such as the motion of the sun and stars in the sky, become very pronounced. Time-lapse is the extreme version of the cinematography technique of undercranking and can be confused with stop motion animation.
The first use of time-lapse photography in a feature film was in Georges Méliès’ motion picture Carrefour De L’Opera (1898). Time-lapse photography of biologic phenomena was partially pioneered by F. Percy Smith in 1910 and Roman Vishniac from 1915 to 1918. Time-lapse photography was further pioneered in a series of feature films called Bergfilms (Mountain films) by Arnold Fanck, in the 1920s, including The Holy Mountain (1926).
But no filmmaker can be credited for popularizing time-lapse more than Dr. John Ott, whose life-work is documented in the DVD-film “Exploring the Spectrum”
Here’s another great example – thanks for the tip from my friend, Mark:
Bathtub V from Keith Loutit on Vimeo.
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Do YOU Drink Wilkins?
If only commercials were still as cool as these for Wilkins Coffee – thanks to Pierre for the tip – made my day : )
Learning Not Alone
One of my interests is instructional design. I think this is primarily due to being subjected to training and other instructional situations that left me feeling not empowered and confident but muscled around, confused and sometimes even empty.
I find that I am influenced by the most unlikely sources, which I incorporate into my own philosophy on-the-fly. I don’t often write about this philosophy, in part because of that philosophy. Some of the best thinkers did not write theirs down. They require face-to-face communication, less they be misinterpreted.
Online communities, on the other hand, allow for this writing down of ideas in real-time, in a conversational style with real people who are listening on the other end of the *line*.
Thus, I find myself more comfortable sharing it as appropriate via those channels. The social networks are a boon for people like me looking to learn and share with others on opposite sides of the world in a streaming, non-linear way that email and related technologies haven’t [up to this point] been able to do.
And this small piece I share here today. I found this bit while I was working in Barcelona earlier this year, published by Google and it made a nice impression on me only because, as I read it, it was clear to me how I was already somehow aware of and putting their tenets to work in my own small corner of the world. Finding the like-minded is one of the best things that can happen. If for no other reason than it makes me feel less lonely.
Thanks for sharing it: Learning Objects and Instructional Design
By Alex Koohang, Keith Harman, Informing Science Institute
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Rock and Swim
I started swimming at lunch again every day after deciding I just wasn’t getting what I need simply from riding my bike to work each day. To sweeten the deal, I picked up one of these lil’ jobbies, the Swimman, an internally-waterproofed iPod shuffle that is not bulky or temperamental and requires no case like the one I used to use [my 2nd-gen iPod recently shit the bed].
For any of you thinking about getting into the pool, nothing motivates me better lap after lap than the right soundtrack.
Highly recommended – thanks, Swimman : )
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Fleet Foxes : Live
Can’t get enough of these fellas lately:
From Wikipedia:
Robin Pecknold and Skye Skjelset both attended Lake Washington High School in Kirkland, a suburb of Seattle, and soon became close friends. Pecknold and Skjelset bonded over a mutual appreciation of Bob Dylan and Neil Young and began making music together. Their parents influenced their musical tastes early on — Skjelset’s mother was a keen listener of both Bob Dylan and Hank Williams while Pecknold’s father was a member of The Fathoms, a local 1960s soul group. The two were interested in the achievements of Dylan and Brian Wilson and realized the importance of practicing music from a young age.
The Conversation
I had a brief chat *conversation* with a pal this morning about The Conversation:
colin
10:39
i never realized hackman could do THATc
10:39
his best film – period
he was great as lex luthor, too, tho ; )colin
10:39
the final shot of him in the room
all alonec
10:39
seriouslycolin
10:39
all torn up
playing saxophone
that’s all he has left
raw nerves and a saxophone
forshadowed by his earlier statement
“i have nothing personal, nothing of value”
DAMN
and then….
fin
the end
that’s it!
no happy ending
no clean resolution
no “justice”c
10:41
that’s why i love it the MOSTcolin
10:41
it just isc
10:41
films with tidy endings are nice
but my favorites don’t seem to have themcolin
10:41
yes
you have to make the ending yourself
what is hackman going to do?
was han solo really aligned w/ the girl the whole time?c
10:42
lol
“you’re not supposed to feel anything. You’re just supposed to do it”colin
10:42
yes
“all I want is a nice fat recording”
if that movie was made nowadays
it would have a huge car chase scene
and some weird heroine with a cat
and it might actually be called “assassins”c
10:44
totally
not enough dressing ie double-glazingcolin
10:44
the whole movie was brimming with raw nerves though
usually when I’m watching films on the road i have it in a smaller window while I research shit in the bg
but not this time
totally sucked in
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Pay them and they will come
For just a moment there, I thought I’d misread the thing. The article stated something about teachers making $125,000 a year and I had to stop what I was doing because some pals and I have agreed with this approach for years. Same as in most any other field, it’s often the pay scale that attracts a strong, competitive workforce. Pull back on the scale, lose some of the fittest applicants.
So it was only with pure revelation I read the piece in the NYT yesterday [omg it's 3:30am].
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Ry and Lu’s house
Our pals in Juneau suffered a tragedy yesterday when their house caught on fire in the middle of the night and burned out. The source of the fire came from the house next door, which only suffered a fraction of the damage.
We can hear Ry’s and Lu’s voices laughing about finding out what’s covered and what’s not. We can laugh because no one was injured aside from losing possessions. Luckily, Ry had time to get a backup drive out with all of their stills and video on it, a couple guitars and Lu’s jewelry box:
