Page of Moss - bloglet for Monday 1 October 2001

er... i didn't mean to say bloglet. i meant to say lynx. _
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06:05:07 PM, Monday 1 October 2001

I'm thinking a lot again, and that right quick, and as a result my language is becoming a lot more fragmented, flowing, lunatical. Like clavdivs on MetaFilter. Like Ezra Pound. What to make of this? Certainly not conducive to thinking things through, but kinda necessary for getting them out in the first place. At its best, a run of this sort of thinking can be used to produce the sort of long ecstatic wandering tracts that worked so well in the renaissance but now seem to be the sole territory of cranks and kooks, and more's the pity that that's so--even the respectable occultists of today have accepted the style of writing of modern rationalism. And the postmodernists come near that sort of ecstatic outburst of intellection and then ruin it all by being too wrapped up in their own little jargon to make any meaning. or rather perhaps their own big jargon--it's the rampant polysyllabicism that really renders it so freakishly impenetrable. Sometimes the god speaks through you, though. Not through the postmodernists, i mean, though i suppose they have a chance, but if you know just exactly what you have to say then sometimes you just know how to say it but good. dear lord, with a little work i swear i could make a convincing schizophrenic, as long as i only presented self through text. _
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03:24:22 PM, Monday 1 October 2001

Q: What's the difference between a computer salesman and a used car salesman? _
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01:54:10 AM, Saturday 29 September 2001

Alex Massie has redesigned again. And she actually seems to be writing things with some frequency. And some of them are really good. _
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03:46:27 PM, Friday 28 September 2001

An advertisement? Like, and advertisement that actually blocks me from seeing the page for several seconds? That does it, I'm never following a link to Salon again.
...
Okay, except Lynda Barry, 'cause she's just cooler than anyone. _
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11:49:14 AM, Friday 28 September 2001

Okay, I fixed the comments on Katherine's bloglet. They work now. For new entries, at least. _
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01:12:47 AM, Friday 28 September 2001

Sentence of the day:

Four years of hard labor, to be followed by one year of soft labor, and 6 months of squishy labor. _
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10:42:27 PM, Thursday 27 September 2001

Is " a single or a double quote? _
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02:29:37 PM, Thursday 27 September 2001

Where has Neil gone? I miss him. _
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12:05:32 PM, Thursday 27 September 2001

Evidently Mike is on to something: November is National Novel Writing Month. _
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11:55:37 AM, Thursday 27 September 2001

A goal for this winter: memorize some long poems. _
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12:00:16 AM, Thursday 27 September 2001

Is the hippie equivalent of a jihad a holy fuck? _
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10:21:05 PM, Wednesday 26 September 2001

This is interesting. _
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07:31:24 PM, Wednesday 26 September 2001

Of course... the younger St. John's students have yahoo or hotmail accounts, or check their mail through the POP interface or the Web interface, while the older ones have been kicked off whorfin already... so now there's nobody left who has to write a bloglet entry every time they want to check their email. I think that goes a long way in explaining the change in tone of the blogmass over time. Certainly it explains why I can no longer count on finding a new entry every time I go looking. _
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04:37:57 PM, Wednesday 26 September 2001

We are blessed with two new bloglets today!

Sara has a bloglet of her own at long last, having, as I understand it, occasionally left messages in Mirabai's bloglet for some time now. My impression is that they were often quite good entries, too, but I was never entirely sure which were which. Now we can be sure. Huzzah for Sara!

And

Tori finally has a bloglet. Tori is extremely cool, and I've been hoping for quite a while that she'd eventually get a bloglet--I suspect she'll be able to use it well. Huzzah for Tori! _
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02:18:36 AM, Wednesday 26 September 2001

Mirabai's pictures are up in the gallery! Anyone that was waiting for them, go see them now. They're a bit low resolution, but they're perfectly wonderful. _
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10:36:05 PM, Tuesday 25 September 2001

hehe. _
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06:41:09 PM, Tuesday 25 September 2001

Vote here: lots of short little cute entries like in the old days, or longer more thought out entries? _
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06:35:24 PM, Tuesday 25 September 2001

this hardly even counts as a new entry, since its only content is self-referential _
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06:33:18 PM, Tuesday 25 September 2001

I want to learn Smalltalk, but I'm afraid that if I do it will be too painful to then have to program in other languages. _
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02:44:23 PM, Tuesday 25 September 2001

Reorient your understanding of the word 'we' for a moment. When people suggest that the United States was partially responsible fore these attacks--by having helped to train terrorists, among other reasons--they are not saying that we brought this on ourselves. They are saying that one of our enemies, one of the powers that helped make this terrible thing possible, is the government of the United States. _
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07:59:01 PM, Monday 24 September 2001

War is not the extension of policy by other means. War is psychopathic. It never accomplishes anything. It's only function is to satisfy a craving for blood. _
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03:09:41 AM, Saturday 22 September 2001

Mike: archiving is done by number of entries, because this is the Worse Is Better solution (counting entries easy, measuring length hard). Bloglet itself imposes no upper limit on the length on an entry, though the operating system may (FreeBSD seems to, Linux seems not to). Now, for God's sake, stop this madness before you kill us all. _
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03:23:43 PM, Friday 21 September 2001

Christopher Hitchens--the guy so radical he'd sling mud at Mother Theresa--has an article in The Nation that expresses what I was getting at here quite well, and in more detail. I recommend reading it. _
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02:29:53 PM, Friday 21 September 2001

In Neuromancer, Gibson seemed to envision cyberspace as a fully immersive environment. It was something that enveloped you, in which you could actually see the glowing tendrils of a world of information spreading out in every direction. This was a very appealing idea--very flashy, very cinematic--but in the end it's hard to imagine how such a thing would actually work. In his newer books, though, and especially in Idoru, there's a subtle difference. The technology presents information in much the same way it does today: basically pictures and text. The really interesting visions of information come, instead, in the minds of the people who understand it. Laney sees nodal points, not because the computer pushes them in through his optic nerve, but because he pulls them out of what he reads. This vision, while not so flashy and exciting as the older one, is ultimately far more compelling, because it is true to the real experience of understanding. In place of the colored lights and glowing webs of Neuromancer style cyberspace, we have a set of purely intellectual structures, described in visual terms only as an approximation of how they feel to the mind. It is the vision of Plato's divided line, recast in a science fiction story. _
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02:10:55 PM, Friday 21 September 2001

Since the available means for moderating a wide range of political opinions are so limited, it seems likely that presidential elections will in fact always be a matter of choosing the lesser of two necessary evils. _
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01:48:42 PM, Friday 21 September 2001

Because it's very, very easy to make things seem simpler than they really are, and it's very, very hard to argue for something convincingly while still recognizing its ambiguities. _
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08:27:09 PM, Thursday 20 September 2001

And now Katherine has comments. _
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01:23:50 AM, Thursday 20 September 2001

I got my mouse wheel working on Linux. This is going to make me a much, much happier web user. _
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12:31:37 AM, Thursday 20 September 2001

I think many people, on the far left in particular (and those are my people, remember), should be especially careful right now not to conflate the question "what motivated the terrorist attacks on September 11th?" with the question "what mistakes has the United States made in its foreign policy?".

I think both are good questions, but the answers are almost certain to be radically different. _
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05:39:02 PM, Wednesday 19 September 2001

Wait... do I have multiline turned on? It seems I do... I wonder how it is that the web interface manages to work. _
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05:17:37 PM, Wednesday 19 September 2001

The placement of "Death Is Not The End" as the last song on Nick Cave's Murder Ballads is utterly brilliant. The performance is excellent, as well. _
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05:06:30 PM, Wednesday 19 September 2001

Cassie's bloglet supports comments. _
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11:50:52 PM, Tuesday 18 September 2001

The Unmitigated Gaul. _
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06:49:23 PM, Tuesday 18 September 2001

Besides which, it reminds me that individual entry linking doesn't work right with the rightwards-scrolling bloglets. I meant that to be pointing at the entry about Conclusion Number Two. _
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06:02:25 PM, Tuesday 18 September 2001

OK, that's just sick. _
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06:00:56 PM, Tuesday 18 September 2001

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