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WHATSNEW

Here we go with the traditional inverse
chronological change-log, without which
no site is complete:



07/22/24

Added:

    FREUD




07/19/24

Added:

    LEE_SOO_YEON




04/22/24

Added:

    PSYCHOLOGY_OF_COMPUTER_PROGRAMMING

    RESEARCH_IS_HARD

    HOW_CAN_WE_STUDY_PROGRAMMING

    PRESSURE_OF_OPINION




03/24/24

The Wim Wenders movie:

    PERFECT_DAYS




01/15/24

The latest (and maybe last, for real) Miyazaki:

    THE_BOY_AND_THE_HERON








12/31/23

Some notes about "Noise" (2021) by Kahneman, Sibony and Sunstein:

    SCATTER_THE_NOISE

    PRECISELY_ACCURATE

    SCATTER_THE_PAGES

    SCATTERING_THE_NOISE_FILTER

    SCATTERING_THE_NOISE_RX

    SCATTER_DEBIAS



The first half of the spell of invocation:

    SHAZ


Zen and the Art--

  --of Motorcycle Maintenance
    
    ZAMM
    
  --of Archery

    ZEN_IN_THE_ART_OF_ARCHERY

    ZAAA_SPRINGS



12/07/23

Some music on my mind of late, 

Slapp Happy's "The Drum":

    THE_DRUM

And the Shamen's "Boss Drum":

    BOSS_DRUM





08/16/23

Thoughts during the Barbie apocalypse:

    BARBIE-ISM

    BARBIE_VS_SEX

    SQUIGGY_STUFF

    WAP_ZONE




06/22/23

Tracing backlinks via web spidering, ala the early Google:

    BACK_SCRATCH

Google, CS nerds, and the revenge of the snake:

    SNAKE_SCRATCH




06/22/23

The Criminal Justice system, such as it is:

    JURY_DUTY

    RANDOM_JURY

    BLACK_ON_BLACK




05/16/23

When random shouldn't be really random:

    GAMBLERS_SHUFFLE

A brief description of one of my main pieces of sound art:

    SPRING_HARP





05/12/23

My list of recommended kdramas (korean dramas):

    KDRAMA_RECS

About the Korean Drama, "Search: WWW" (2019):

    SEARCH_WWW

    SEARCH_BLUR

    SEARCH_DUST

    SEARCH_POP

About the Korean Drama, "Avengers Social Club":

    AVENGERS_SOCIAL_CLUB



05/12/23

Google's evil-lite vs. Mozilla's not-so-lite:

    EYES_ON_EVIL


Should one have a general guiding principle,
or a mass of precise rules?

    GENERAL_VAGUE


Standard transformations to generate new ideas:

    TRANSFORMS


A directory to remarks focused on "time scales":

    TIME_SCALES


Brian Christian's "Algorithms for Lving":

    LIVING_ALGORITHMS


Towards a web site to increase our collective human cognition:

    COGS


My long-standing practice of carrying a pocket notebook around with me:

    POCKET_MARKED




04/09/23

Meharan Sahami back in 2012 had a deep conviction that
what the world needs is more Computer Science majors,
because CS knows best:

    COMP_SIGH

Brian Harvey at Berkeley in 2008 confuses divide-and-conquer
organizational strategies with related (but not identical)
things like "programming paradigms" and "abstraction":

    DIVISION




04/01/23

What people now call "algorithms" may be generated by algorithms,
but are actually something else:

    ALGORITHM




03/19/23

  "System Error" (2021)

  "Where Big Tech Went Wrong and
   How We Can Reboot"

   by Rob Reich, Meharan Sahami and Jeremey M. Weinstein

    SYSTEM_ERROR
    SYSTEM_ERROR_VALUES
    SYSTEM_ERROR_FREE_SPEECH
    SYSTEM_ERROR_OPTIMIND
    SYSTEM_ERROR_SCWARTZ
    SYSTEM_ERROR_AGENDA
    SYSTEM_ERROR_USER_DATA
    SOCIAL_SYSTEMS_UNIVERSAL_POST
    SOCIAL_SYSTEMS_UNIVERSAL_ID
    SYSTEM_ERROR_BORED_SEATS
    SYSTEM_ERROR_IN_ANTI_WE_TRUST
    SYSTEM_ERROR_DEMOCRITICAL
    SYSTEM_ERROR_TECH_ASSESS_RECESS
    SYSTEM_ERROR_CAPITAL_LINE
    SYSTEM_ERROR_AD_SAPPERS
    SYSTEM_ERROR_KING_TAKES_KING
    SYSTEM_ERROR_JAMES_VACCA




03/04/23

On reading the Robert Graves poem "Interruption":

    GRAVE_INTERRUPTIONS

    INTERRUPTION_EXHUMED

The subject of a sentence is not always critical, sometimes it's
arbitrarily chosen:

    SUBJECTED

Jill Paton Walsh and her dubious Peter Whimsey covers.

    WALSHED_OUT

Old piece from 2015, linked to but never pushed out
(now it can be told):

    LUDLUM




02/01/23

Cyril M Wecht, a forensic pathologist with some long standing
complaints about the case of the assassinations of JFK and RFK:

    WARREN_ALL_WECHT


01/31/23

The Warren Report and the HSCA Report:

    TALE_OF_TWO_TALES


Posting thse remarks here is "unlikely to change the
conclusion of the Warren Commision":

    THE_IMMORTAL_WARREN




01/29/23
   
Jennie Kermode of alt.gothic, on the end of periods            
of creativity:                                             
              
    DEVIL_CHEATED
 
erithromycin of alt.gothic on the existance of obvious categories
making it harder to find the non-generic forms:

    BEHIND_THE_SIGN

A feature I miss from Alta Vista: "NEAR"

    NEAR_VISTA

If you expect the pattern of "new media => burst of diversity",
what should you do with such a period the next time you encounter one?
                                                                      
    PATTERN_ACTION                  




01/29/23

Squib about listening to a pair of deep female voices:

    DEEP_FEM




01/25/23

The libertarian-computer science connection
(breaking out an old thought for easy linking.)

    SMALL_BITES

The intellectual considered as a damaged personality,
too socially inept to pass as "normal":

    DAMAGED_ORBIT




12/12/22

And once more around "Bell, Book and Candle (1958)":

    BELL_BOOK_RENEWED

    BELL_BOOK_RETURNED




11/09/22

As of 2003 I was still "on the fence" concerning global warming:

    WARMING_FENCE




10/22/22

Moira Weigel on Raymond Williams "Keywords"; and also Franco Moretti:

    MOIRA_GRAPH
    LEAD_SPRING

The role of "fate" in genre fiction plots:

    PLOTTING_FATE

A touch of "method":

    SUSPENDED




10/22/22

"The Sciences of the Artificial" by Herbert A. Simon:

    ARTIFICIAL_SIMON

    SIMON_SAYS_MORE

    FORMALIST

    RITUAL_DISPLAY

    COMPLEX_SIMON




10/20/22

Some thoughts on song-writing (not that I'm by any stretch a song-writer):

    GENERATORS




10/20/22

Dr. Kelp: "Music is derivative."

    DERIVATIVE




10/20/22

A dream where walking downhill turns into a downclimb
down a damaged, eroded hillside:

    DOWNCLIMB




10/20/22

David S. Ware: the reservoir metaphor and performance spaces:

    RESERVOIR_BOTTOM




10/20/22

David Byrne, "How Music Works", creativity stems from
context, not the mysterious upwelling from the soul of a lone genius:

    ROMANTIC_MUSE




10/20/22

Cog psy: "we're all dumb".

    SMARTER_SHADE_OF_DUMB




10/20/22

Multiple things that are at "the center" of everything else:

    ART_CENTER

Art does not require "generality", contraints drive the creative process:

    UNLIMITED_CONSTRAINT

Examples of using constraint to increase creativity:

    LIMITATIONS_AND_FREEDOM

Abusing the public domain as raw materials:

    ART_DOMAIN

An minor idea for a comic strip using easily available photos:

    THE_BLACK_CAT_STRIP

William Hogarth or Virgil Finlay:

    PRINT_IN_THE_BLANK

Dave Sim's "The Judge", the authoritative voice undercut:

    BROKEN_SIMMETRY




10/06/22

Whafflers gotta whaffle as Facebook watches Rome burn.

    DRAG_THE_ZONE




10/05/22

Web search engines, and on into Auerbach's "Bitwise" again:

    ENGINE_TROUBLE

    BITWASTES_METASTASIZED

    BITWASTES_DUMBGOD

    ENGINE_EXP

    BROKEN_WEB

    ADDING_EVIL

    PAGES_YELLOWED

    KRUGMAN_WEBBED

    SOUND_THE_ALARMIST

    AD_BLOCKED_WEB

    DOOMED_WEB

    THE_AGE_OF_TWITS

    QUICKSAND

    BLOWING_SMOKE

    CHOOSING_A_FUTURE




09/04/22

Topic sentences are good:

    THE_LANCASTER_LESSONS




09/02/22

Additional remarks related to the move "Bell, Book and Candle"

    BELL_BOOK_AND_VILLAGE

    BELL_BOOK_AND_GOTH

    ERNIE_KOVACS




09/01/22

As of 08/11/22, I was wondering about this:

    ANIMISM_VS_GOMI

I put some effort into looking up what people say about animism,
trying to get some sense of whether it's normal for an animist to
regard the creations of human beings as having a spirit or soul:

    ANIMISM_IN_THE_AIR

    ANIMISM_PURITY

    ANIMISM_KEGARE_PARTY

    ANIMISM_CREATIONS

    ANIMISM_HARVEY

    ANIMISM_ARBOREALISM

    ANIMISM_HUMAN_WORLD

    ANIMISM_CLASSICS

    ANIMISM_GIDGET

    ANIMISM_KIDBOTS

    MACHINIC_ANIMISM




08/29/22

The natural peaks that put Bali on the map:

    BALI_UNVEILED


08/07/22

A small collage project had me envisioning something that literally
couldn't be done:

    IMPOSSIBLE_GEOMETRIES




08/06/22

Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus"

    TRACTATUS




08/06/22

An outline of different games you can play with reading:

    WAYS_OF_READING




08/01/22

Playing a game with my old stacks:

    SEDIMENTARY_LAYER_CAKE

A few things from the 2017 layer:

    PRODUCT_2017

    GEOENGINEERING_2017

    OTAKU_USA_2017




07/31/22

The film from 1958, "Bell, Book and Candle":

    BELL_BOOK_AND_CANDLE




07/31/22

Links to a few cases of the goth transformation in films--
women dress in black when they lose their innocence,
and switch back to white if it's regained:

    GOTH_TRANSFORM




07/31/22

Association links in hypertext, ala the memex:

    ASSOCIATION




07/22/22

Revisiting Thierry Bardini's "Bootstrapping", and once again finding
it a mixture of useful intellectual history and whacked intellectual
blather...

    BOUNDARY_OF_METAPHOR

A few notes on the infamous "Turing Test":

    TURING_REST

Bertrand Russell, 1931, sings the praises of abstraction, and overplays
his hand a bit:

    ABSTRACTION_BEAM




07/22/22

Auerbach's "Bitwise" on Facebooks categorization schemes:


    BITWASTES_FACECATS




07/22/22

Auerbach's "Bitwise", a brief summary of the thesis about the problems
with human categorization schemes in a software driven age:

    BITWASTES_SOFTCATS




06/15/22

The phrase "derangement syndrome" is interesting, because at first
glance it's hard to tell if you're a defender or an attacker,
because there's all different kinds of derangement out there...
(spoiler: I'm usually-- but not always--  a Bernie defender):

    BERNIE_DERANGEMENT_SYNDROME




06/09/22

Frederick P. Brooks, and the legendary "Mythical Man-Month":

    CROSSING_BROOKS
    EVOLVING_BROOKS




05/25/22

Bertrand Russell and John Dewey again:

    RUSSELL_THE_DEW
    RUSSELLING_THE_DOUBT




05/24/22

An old bit, responding to the common accusation that the critical
opinons of Hillary Clinton are necessarily rooted in sexism:

    CONFESSIONS_OF_A_HILLARY_HATER




05/23/22

Michael Berube and ye olde "Science Wars", arguing that the pomo lefts
anti-science has fueled the right's climate change denialism:

    BERUBE_SCIENCE_WARS




05/12/22

Finishing up some things I was writing ten years ago, going through
C.S. Pierce, "How to Make our Ideas Clear" (1878):

    SUNKEN_REEFS
    PIERCE_OF_STARS
    PEIRCE_OF_MELODY

    PEIRCE_THE_FORCE
    PEIRCE_THE_GATE

    CACOPHONIES_AND_SOLOS
    PEIRCE_REALITY

05/12/22

Pew shows cell phone use is finally up at the level the fad-compliant
thought it was a decade ago:

    PHONES_UBER_ALLES

But real computers are back up also-- no one serious tries to get by with
just a smart phone:

    KEYS_ABIDE


05/11/22

Examining  my own reaction to idiot plots:

    IDIOTS_LAMENT




05/06/22

Paul Goodman on how reasoning based on exclusion requires you know the
full range of possibilities:

    EXCLUDE_LOGIC


04/21/22

A thesis scattered through these pages: the primacy of stories
to our thinking (a directory to places this is talked around):

    FICTIONAL_MANIFESTO

Starting over, another attempt at manifesting the manifesto:

    GROUND_FLOOR

We are afflicted with a disease of our fiction:

    DISEASED_STORIES

Gaiman's story about "the true stories" ignores the diverse
ranges of variations:

    STORIES_DIVERGE

Light fiction inspires, heavy fiction enervates:

    RELIT_FLAME

The grand manifesto of Cordwainer Smith stills fall short of
what can be done:

    UNDERGROUND_LAKES



I usually think in terms of a need to increase our
intelligence, if that *can't* be done, what strategies would
you use to compensate for that?

    DUMBING_UP

There are books that make people feel smart without working hard:

    FLATTER_THE_MARKS

In romcoms, the second male often seems like a better pick than
the first, and in the multi-relationship version, the background
relationships often seem more engaging:

    SECOND_LEAD
    SECOND_COUPLE


04/20/22

"loss aversion" may be yet another "cognitive bias" that's not well
supported by actual data:

    LOSING_LOSS_AVERSION




04/20/22

Stating the obvious about the need to do social science experiments
to find out what social practices work best.

    TO_FIND_WHAT_WORKS_LOOK




04/18/22

Alan Kay's talk in 2020 at the "goto;" conference,
what might it take to turn software engineering into
something like real engineering?

    GOTO_ALAN_KAY

    SAFER_WORLD

    SYSTEMS

    SKETCHPAD




04/18/22

More on Bertrand Russell's "Philosophy of Logical Atomism"

    LOGICAL_ATOM_CLASS
    LOGICAL_ATOM_GOLF




04/09/22

"Metropolis on the Styx" (2007) by David L. Pike
and the state of academic writing:

    DEEPSIX
    DEEPSIX_PLANS
    DEEPSIX_CONVERGENCE
    DEEPSIX_PUNK
    DEEPSIX_MYSTERIES
    DEEPSIX_INTERNET




04/08/22

Alachia Queen's complaints about the American movie
"Ghost in the Shell":

    GHOST_IDENTITY


04/04/22

The genre of motivational slogans:

    MOTIVATIONAL_SLOG
    NEW_BEGINNINGS_AGAIN


03/31/22

Skimming through the Hugo Awards lists:

    HUGO_SKIMMER

Clifford D. Simak's "Time is the Simplest Thing":

    GOING_ALIEN



03/30/22

A friend forwarded some material by Delany from his facebook page,
referring to an old commentary on Le Guin's "Dispossessed", which sent
me off into an extended session revisiting the burning issues of late
70s/early 80s SF:

    LEGUIN_AGAIN
    POMPOUS_ROSE_AGAIN
    CONSENSUS_IS_NEGATIVE
    RUMPUS_ROSE
    FTL_ATTACK
    MONGOL_SPACE
    THE_HARD_EQUATIONS
    HG_WELLS_ONE
    FTL
    HARD_RIGHT
    HARD_PURPOSE
    POSSIBILITIES
    WORLDS_OF_IF




03/30/22

Extracted a bit from the old LIBERTY page for ease-of-linking:

    LIBERTARIAN_COMPUTERS




03/21/22

Extracted some material about the Benford/Platt piece "The Pompous Rose",
originally at the tail end of the "PROVIDENCE" page:

    POMPOUS_ROSE


03/09/22 - 03/13/22

A few more additions about the critical
aparatus of the outsider world of "low
fiction"; and some associated remarks:

    MARY_SUE
    KYOKO_SUE
    SO_SUE_ME

    DR_SMITH
    GENEALOGIES
    ROBOTISM

    THROUGH_THE_BOOM_TUBE


03/08/22

The Rafael Sabatini novel from 1921:

    SCARAMOUCHE




02/27/22

Buddhism rules, as proven by Cognitive Science!  Or not.

    THE_EMBODIED_MIND




02/19/22

Revisiting an old favorite, The Replacements "Left of the Dial" (1985)

    DIAL




01/28/22

The anti-bike normies crawl out of the woodwork given the slightest excuse,
or none at all...

    CYCLING_AROUND

A tale of an overactive, anti-bike security guard, and the new bike
friendly Emeryville:

    CYCLING_EVILLE


01/28/22

Added:

    DREAM_RACE




01/18/22

what the music might mean, what direction to follow

    THE_SONIC_NORTHSTAR





12/29/21

About the David Auerbach book
"Bitwise: A Life in Code" (2018):

    BITWASTES

    BITWASTES_ANTIPOP

    BITWASTES_BEGINNINGS

    BITWASTES_PLATONESQUE

    BITWASTES_THE_REAL_VS_THE_UNIDEAL

    BITWASTES_COMPANY_MAN

    BITWASTES_DSM

    BITWASTES_PSYCHO

    BITWASTES_MUSIC

01/28/22

    BITWASTES_COMPUTER_VALUES




12/28/21

John Dewey on "Logic", and Russell's complaints about it:

    DEWEY_EYED

    DEWEY_BALANCE

    DEWEY_WALK

    MURPHYS_LOGIC

    THE_TRUE_PEIRCE

    DEWEY_INTROSPECTIVE

    RUSSELL_ALL_TRUED_UP

    RUSSELLING_DEWEY_1939

    RUSSELLING_DEWEY_1946

    MUDWALLS

    PYTHAGOREAN_RETREAT

    BASIC_RUSSELL

    DEWEY_INQUIRY

    DEWEY_INQUIRY_HOW_AND_WHAT


01/14/22-01/15/22

Some head clearence:

    CLEARENCE

    CHANGING_CLIMATE

    BURROUGHS_LOST

    CONSENT_AGE

       GOBLIN_AGE

       HEPBURN

Answering a challenge from long-ago: have I read the poem "Gunga Din"?
Another on the "fallible memory" theme:

       THE_FORGETTING_OF_THINGS_PAST

A conundrum of sorts-- what kind of music have I been into lately?
Am I into music now? What do I expect from music?

    MUSIC_LATELY





Some stuff written back in 2018, finally finished up well enough to push out:

    OTA_SPACE

    OH_MY_GHOST

    SHUT_UP_FLOWER

    STRONG_GIRL_DO_BONG_SOON

    MY_LOVE_FROM_ANOTHER_STAR




01/15/22

Another addition for the "low-fiction critical apparatus" section:

    RURITANIA





01/14/22

Beginning yet another (pro) nuclear power faq:

    NUCLEAR_FAQ

    FROM_FRANCE

    WASTE_BREATH

    TOO_MUCH






12/18/21

Sun Ra goes for the heart, because the audience
is brainwashed anyway:

    SUNRA_REACHES




12/18/21

Buncha stuff about the Founding Slaveholders:

    JEFFERSONS_SLAVES


12/09/21

Kawame Anthony Appiah on the Claude Levi-Strauss phenomena:

    LEVI-STRAUSS
    LEVI-STRAUSS_VS_SARTRE
    LEVI-STRAUSS_OPPOSITION_PARALLEL
    LEVI-STRAUSS_BARRACKS

Herbert Spencer and the chracter Casuabon from George Elliot's "Middlemarch"

    MYTH_KEY

Appiah uses an apostrophe s after an s, as in "Levi-Strauss's":

    POSSESSIVES

Appiah argues cultural objects are different from scientific texts in
that we like to go back to the originals:

    ORIGINAL_SOURCES




12/06/21

An entry-point to refer to a common theme with me, the quest
for a "two cultures crossover":

    SYNCRETIC




12/04/21

About the "Charlie Chan" novels:

    READING_CHAN
    HOUSE_WITHOUT_A_KEY
    BEHIND_THAT_CURTAIN
    COLORFUL_DETECTIVE_CLUB




11/18/21

David Talbot goes over the record of sleazy maneuvers Allen
Dulles engaged in, making the case it's all-too-plausible he
had JFK assassinated:

    DULLES_DID_IT

         ("Debbie did Dallas, but Dulles did Everything Else."
          I really wish I could get that joke to make sense.)



11/12/21

Going over a mid-1990s Paul Krugman book, and a lecture
representing his more recent opinons:

    PEDDLING_PROSPERITY_RECYCLED
    THE_PEDDLING_PROSPERITY_OF_MEMORY
    KRUGMAN_TRADES


11/11/21

Chiming in on a topic that was hot in the pundit sphere a good
five years ago: those damn liberal hypocrites in San Francisco
won't let us fix the housing crisis by building whatever we want
where ever we want.

This is honestly all pretty repetitious, where I make similar points
over-and-over:  why wouldn't you point your finger at the places
that have much lower housing density like Mountain View, Cupertino,
and all those other Silicon Valley towns no one on the East Coast
has ever heard of?

    BUILD_BABY_BUILD
    ECON101
    REAL_101
    DENSE_ARGUMENTS
    THE_COAST_LINE
    BAYING_AT_REBECCA
    PUBLIC_HOUSING
    NOAH_BLOOMING
    TOO_DAMN_YGLESIAS
    SABER_RENT
    KRUGMAN_RENT
    CUTLET_CRUNCHING
    YGLESIAS_BLOWS_FROM_THE_EAST




11/08/21

In response to a random question about films shot in San Francisco,
I came up with a brief list, and suddenly realized there's a type
of movie missing from the record:

    SAN_FRANCISCO_FILM




09/29/21

Breaking "news": AOC's behavior on the Israel Iron Dome vote explained at last:

    OCASIO_CORTEZ_WEPT




09/22/21

About the Korean drama version of "Life on Mars" (a remake of a
British show):

    LIFE_ON_KDRAMA




09/22/21

Philip E. High's "These Savage Futurians", the tech-is-outlawed
motif, ACE doubles, and the actual Futurians:

    SAVAGE_FUTURIANS




09/21/21

david bowie and science fiction

    PRESS_YOUR_SPACE_FACE




09/19/21

Imagining how the process might've reshaped the text of
Burrough's "Nova Express":

    NOVA_EXPRESS_RESLICED




09/17/21

From an interdisciplanary study of interdiciplanarity, some lists
of observed characteristics:

    INTERDIS

Some general remarks on specialization:

    SPECIALIZATION




09/17/21

A piece from 2015 "The Two Gatekeepers", now re-set in
doomfiles format.  The general idea is: there are two stages of
intellectual evaluation, in the first stage one works quickly,
using heuristics like "trust the experts", in the later stage
you may engage with the material more closely, and principles
such as "avoid argument from authority" become applicable:

    TWO_GATES
    TWO_LOGIC_REWRITES
    TWO_STAGES
    TWO_WRONG
    TWO_NUKES
    TWO_RUDE
    TWO_LIARS
    TWO_THE_IGNORABLES
    TWO_LEAKS


09/16/21

Russell Jacoby interviewd by John Tangley in 2019.

    TANGLING_WITH_JACOBY
    WHAT_PRICE_INTELLECTUALS
    ASTROLOGY_DEPARTMENT




09/16/21

Pondering whether Nextdoor might be trying to quietly
censor or downplay the ever-popular (in my neighborhood,
anyway) discussions of gun fire:

    NEXTDOORED






09/15/21

Kids these days thing "free speech" is just a rallying cry of the "toxic"
(probably repeating myself, as us geezers do):

    FREE_SPEECH_DETOX

AOC's hard-hitting questioning of the Zuckster has some disturbing
overtones to my ear:

    AOC_FACESOFF_FACEBOOK




09/15/21

Speculation on the source of the slang "trap" for crossdresser
(a question for another day, whither the now old-fashioned term
"transvestite" and why has it whithered?):

    CROSS_TRAP




09/15/21

The difficult of contriving an artificial slang that rings true:

    ARTIFICIAL_SLANG




09/14/21

The Cosma Shaliz challenge from some years ago is "Who is the
modern equivalent of Betrand Russell?":

    SHALIZI_CHALLENGE

I periodically try to track down that piece but I keep getting
baffled because the version of it I read originally is long gone,
and the one that survives is missing an appended remark at the
bottom about Jacoby's "Last Intellectuals", and the main focus of
the piece is inane bitching about how Chomsky is overrated:

    SHALIZI_CHALLENGES_CHOMSKY

09/04/21

Complaining about how Berke Breathed is overrated:

    CANT_BREATHED

09/07/21

A pair of anime's from one season riffing off of the old mahou shojou,
both variants broken in different ways:

    MAGICAL_GIRL_SHITE

09/04/21

The JFK and RFK assassinations re-visited, inspired by the
fanatic moderates of electoral-vote.com:

    NOTHING_EVER_FITS
    CORNER_OF_RFK_AND_SIRHAN
    Z_NODS
    SHORTER_JFK
    THEORY_NO_MORE
    E_V
    TANNENBAUM_MICROK
    INTEL_ME_NOT_FOR_ME




08/26/21

Monbiot on the Afghan invasion mindset of 20 years ago:

    THE_BARBARA_LEE_SHORE




08/13/21

An overview of my old guide to San Francisco and the attitude
behind it:

    LOST_GUIDE

A conflict I thought I could perceive from the outside between
the modernists and traditionalists of Japantown:

    SEE_SAW


    UPSTARTS
    START_UPS
    SF_STALLED

A few anime recommendations from Tommy the goth-industrial barista:

    TOMMYGUN

Timeline of the vampirism infection:

    VAMPIRE_TIME

The state of the lower-east side coffee house, a pick from a
Korean drama of 2012:

    ON_THE_BEAN

"The Bean" gets it.  Or me, at least:

    BEAN_THERE

A slow-burning complaint dating back to the late-90s:

    BURNT_COFFEE

Aquarius Records and the "pretentious hipster" employee syndrome:

    DAWNING_AT_AQUARIUS




07/22/21

Heather McGhee's excellent "The Sum of Us" (2021).
Racism isn't something that helps whites, it hurts
everyone, including whites:


    THE_SUM_OF_US
    SUM_AFFIRMATIVE
    SUM_GOING_SOUTH
    SUM_GOVERNMENT_AS_BLACK
    SUM_ISOWHITE




07/19-21/21

Renee DiResta, ace misinformation warrior who can't
think straight for three sentences running:

    DIRESTA
    DIRESTA_2020
    DIRESTA_VS_THE_FAANG

A generation has grown up associating ideas like "free speech"
with conserva-trolls:

    POISONED_WELLS




07/19/21

Going through Englebart's 1962 proposal for an exploratory program
to develop systems of Human Augmentation:

    AUGMENTATION

    PERSONAL_AUGMENTAION

    WIDE_AUGMENTATION

    AUGMENTATION_MEANS

    ENGLEBART_HIERARCHY

    ABORIGINAL_ENGLEBART

    PRIMITIVE_FUTURES


Predicting the car vs predicting the traffic jam--
neat gadgets vs social effects:

    JAM

Quick bit about and old intellectual trope,
the casual comparison between moderns and
primitives despite not knowing anything much
about the "primitives":


    PRIMITIVE_MODERNS

Found a reference to answer a burning scholarly question--
what did Englebart say about Korzybski and Whorf?

    ENGLEBART_KORZYBSKI_WHORF





06/29/21

Fanatic devotion to the idea of moderation in politics:

    MODERATE_JIHAD

David Leonhardt and the moderate strategy: winning through wishy-washiness.

    MODERATE_LION_HEART

Small bit about how popular news stories are always the worst:

    VOXPOP_TRASHPOP

The New York Times daily newsletter:

    DAILY_NAIL

David Leonhardt trots out the same old, spinning for Israel:

    LION_HEART_ISRAEL

Hamas has pretty clear conditions for truce that just aren't that heinous:

    ON_THE_HAMAS_SIDE

Leonhardt has a bug up his ass about the medical establishment
not say precisely what he thinks they should, when he thinks
they should:

    LION_HEART_MASKED

The New York Times evidently continues to feature pro-Israel spin
(and Leonhardt regards the Bretbug as a "colleague").

    SEEMS_LIKE_OLD_TIMES

Ranked choice voting systems are not a panacea for the left:

    RANKEDCHOICE




06/25/21

A list of some great, relatively neglected movies:

    MOVIES




06/22/21

Prohibition on word re-use might help with clarity, not just style:

    DOUBLE_STYLE

Small points that assist clarity: saying the full name and avoiding acronyms:

    MORE_IS_MORE




06/21/21

Augmenting the intelligence of humanity:

    THE_BIG_GAME

Englebart indulging in an ESTism?

    YOU_JUST_DONT_GET_IT




05/15/21

Digesting old issues of the AAAS Science:

    PACKRAT_SCIENCE

"Cracked scientific take-aways, free-form riffing off of things"

    TECHNOIDAL_RIFFS

Naming that makes it clear if it's something about the thing or
the thing itself:

    DISTINCT_NAMING




05/11/21

A murky racial issue on stage in the anime "Revolutionary Girl Utena"

    UTENA

Anime characters that start out black but get retconned to
something else:

    FADE_FROM_BLACK

The demands of "realism" used as a wide bludgeon against
nearly anything you might care about; the young hip-hop
fan Ta-Nehisi Coates:

    HERE_IN_THE_REAL

A few examples of the appeal of negative truths:  Dan Kahan,
"The Backfire Effect"...

    NEGATIVE_TRUTH

(sex == evil) => innocent and happy or experienced and tormented

    DELIGHTFUL_GIRL

Me and hiphop

    HIPHOP

A group of Oakland otaku at Kraken Con:

    KRAKEN_WEB_MOB




04/27/21

Key principle of social design:

    NOTHING_WORKS

The illiberal left considered as the leftwing equivalent of karens:

    TANGLED_NETS

The current standard for behavior standards and the poor standards for them:

    STANDARD_MAINTAINING

Cardi B vs the delicate flowers:

    SLIPPERY_SLOPES




03/31/21

An episode of the Roger Moore Saint, similarities to the Charteris stories:

    GOLDEN_FROG




03/30/21

An anime that looks horribly unpromising at first, turns out to be better
than expected... and then veers back to being completely disappointing:

    PAIR_OF_QUINTUPLETS

Recurrent patterns in fiction aren't necessarily failures:

    FIRST_GIRL


A surprisingly interesting anime, "Bottom-Tier Character Tomozaki":

    BOTTOM_TIER




03/30/21

Gundam veers toward fantasies of spiritualism:

    GUNDAM_NARRATIVE




03/20/21

Korzybski's attempts at elimination of "identification":

    ID_DENTED

Our primitive ancestors, the 1930s intellectual Korzybski:

    CANDY_FROM_A_RHETORICAL_BABY




03/19/21

A long piece from 2014 handing Ayn Rand the crown for "Novels of
Ideas" because no one else was really trying at that point:

    PRAISE_RAND




03/17/21

Re-considering the doctrine that stories must focus on
conflict-resolution:

    WITHOUT_CONFLICT




03/10/21

Leonard Susskind, the original string theory physicist:

    LEONARD_SUSSKIND




03/08/21

Starting through the basics of "free speech" and the modern contempt for it:

    FREE_SPEECH
    THE_DOCTRINE_FAIR
    FUTURE_SPEECH

    COG_ZERO
    FAIRNESS_GLOW_OF_HINDSIGHT

Some remarks about EST, "Earhardt Senistivity Training":

    EAR_HEART_WORM

Beginning on Alfred Korzybski's impressive tome from 1933:

    SCIENCE_AND_SANITY

Jane Austen.  Better late.

    PRIDE_AND_PREJUDICE

A quote about San Jose having lost it's sould in recent decades:

    SAN_JOSE_IN_DECLINE

Reminiscing about the old days in Palo Alto.  I didn't think it was
a terribly cool town back then, but in comparison to these days...

    LOWTIDE

A minor story that I suspect I alone think is funny, about a
brief encounter on Valencia street:

    SO_MISUNDERSTOOD




02/13/21

W. V. Quine's essay "Natural Kinds":

    NATURAL_KINDS




02/08/21

Added:

    HUMAN_MONBIOT




02/04/21

Added:

    TENTH_CLUE




12/05/20

Added:

    CONVENITONAL_ARISTOTLE




12/02/20

Added:

    THE_SCIENCE

    STRUNG_ALONG




12/02/20

Notes upon re-reading Chandler's "The Long Goodbye":

    THE_LONG_GOOSEBERRY

    RAYMONDS_PERCH




11/14/20

Some self-criticism from the dream-world:

    DREAM_CRITIC


A flip remark made in a dream, criticized and defended:

    FLIP_RACISM




10/17/20

The recent Korean Drama "The King: Eternal Monarch":

    THE_KING_ETERNAL_MYSTERY




10/17/20

A big 2018 study concludes there's "no safe level" for alcohol
consumption, i.e. the idea that "moderate drinking is beneficial"
is wrong:

    NO_SAFE_LEVEL




10/16/20

A quote from a 1985 Bruce Sterling story: "You engineers are all mystics."

    MYSTIC_ENGINEERING




10/15/20

In 1905, H.G. Wells objects to the scientifically designed language idea:

    FORMLESS_EMBRYO




09/30/20

Elliot Paul books as a counter-argument to my single-pov philosophy
of fiction-- could it be that a group or protagonists can function
as a single compound-POV?

    TOO_MANY_EYES




09/30/20

Open question about the source of a motif-- contact
with humanity humanizes:

    MAKER_OF_HUMANS


09/27/20

Jessica Riskin uses a review of a book on the history of
the idea of "the scientific method" to launch attacks on
C.P. Snow and modern industrial civilization:

    LIMITED_HEAD

That old attempt at reducing science to the five step
"scientific method":

    FIVE_STEP_SCIENCE


09/27/20

What is it that I *want* to believe Sartre is trying to say
about "dialectics".  What do I want from the dialectic process?

    SCRAPING_DIALECTIC


09/25/20

Some jamming inspired by Charles Stross musing about plots that have
become invalidated by modern conditions, e.g. the widespread adoption
of mobile devices:

    DEAD_PLOTS
    PHONEPLAY
    NO_SIGNAL_SEA

09/16/20

Some more commentary on Russell's attempts
determining the logicial "foundations" of
mathematics, much of which has been sitting around
on disk for a year.  Cleaned up (slightly) and
pushed out, in all it's somewhat repetitive
lack-of-glory, here tis:

    CARTS_AND_HORSES
    UNCERTAIN_ADVENTURE
    BIG_FROM_SMALL
    RUSSELL_KANT_EUCLID
    RUDE_SHOCKS
    CROOKED_EUCLID
    A_BEAUTY_COLD_AND_AUSTERE
    AD_MATHEMATICA_AD_NASEUM
    WHATS_ZFC_DONE_FOR_ME

On some bits of Betrand Russell's "Philosophy of Logical Atomism":

    ATOM_LOG

Goedel's Incompleteness, cribbing from wikipedia, no less:

    INCOMPLETE_GOEDEL

09/13/20

Russell's goal in rooting math in logic.  Greater generality?

    GENERAL_RUSSELL


09/12/20

How is one to take the idea that Sun Ra was an extraterrestrial?

    THE_TRUTH_OF_RA


09/08/20

More about "The Foundations of Mathematics"

    FOUND_MATH

Bertrand Russell's account of his own early attractions to math
and philosophy as part of a quest for something like certain knowledge:

    SUCH_A_THING_AS_KNOWLEDGE

The programmer's version of "golf":

    PLAYING_GOLF

Noodling around comparing the incompatibility test with logical and & not:

    NOT_INCOMPATIBLE

Bertrand Russell on "epistemological premises":

    EPISTEMS

Puzzling over what Bertrand Russell means by "psychology" in this context:

    EPISTEM_PSYCHOLOGY

Some extensive quotation of Russell stepping through some ABCs
about how an individual knows something:

    EPISTEM_MOMENT




08/10/20

Re-visiting the "Biter Bit" form:

    BITER_REBITTEN

Discussion of an episode of The Prisoner, where the implicit
question is whether this is a tragedy or a "biter bit" story.
(A tragedy I think, which makes pairing it with "BITER_REBITTEN"
rather dimwitted.)

    PRISONER_OR_JAILER





07/26/20

Working my way through Ta-Nehisi Coates "Eight Years in Power", a
book published in 2017, a collection of his earlier writings for
the Atlantic with some additional expanded material:

    TA-NEHISI_COATES
    TA-NEHISI_STYLE
    TA-NEHISI_HOP
    NAS_ONE_LOVE
    DAYS_OF_OLD
    TA-NEHISI_REPARATIONS
    TA-NEHISI_JOY
    TA-NEHISI_PEACE
    WHITE_PRIVILEGE
    SLOGAN_ENGINEERING
    TA-NEHISI_BURNS
    TA-NEHISI_AMERICAN
    WHITE_HOPE
    CLASS_VS_RACE

07/27/20

Jamming around on the subject of credentials and credentialism,
how do people use them, what do they really tell you, etc.  This
was a long piece I ran at the dailykos back in 2015, broken up
into doomfiles pages:

    CREDENTIALS
    CREDENTIALS_AMORY_LOVINS
    CREDENTIALS_COUNTING_HONORARIES
    CREDENTIALS_FREEMAN_DYSON
    CREDENTIALS_K_ERIC_DREXLER
    CREDENTIALS_STEWART_BRAND
    CREDENTIALS_JANE_JACOBS
    CREDENTIALS_TED_NELSON
    CREDENTIALS_THE_LAST_INTELLECTUALS
    CREDENTIALS_LOVINS_THE_OUTSIDER
    CREDENTIALS_LOVINS_PROFESSIONAL_OUTSIDER
    CREDENTIALS_LOVINS_VS_THE_FOUR
    CREDENTIALS_JAMES
    CREDENTIALS_BENJAMIN_K_SOVACOOL
    CREDENTIALS_SOCIAL_SCIENCE_AND_ENERGY_POLICY
    CREDENTIALS_RICHARD_POSNER
    CREDENTIALS_IPCC
    CREDENTIALS_HELEN_CALDICOTT
    CREDENTIALS_GEORGE_MONBIOT
    CREDENTIALS_PAUL_KRUGMAN
    CREDENTIALS_PHDS
    CREDENTIALS_FREEMAN_DYSON_NODS
    CREDENTIALS_JAMES_HANSEN_NODS
    CREDENTIALS_PAUL_KRUGMAN_NODS
    CREDENTIALS_ROD_ADAMS
    CREDENTIALS_ME
    CREDENTIALS_AND_IN_CONCLUSION_SORT_OF
    CREDENTIALS_AN_APPENDIX_ON_METHOD
    CREDENTIALS_ONWARD

07/27/20

A brief Freeman Dyson obituary, essentially a collection of links
to other things I've written about him:

    FREEMAN_DOWN



07/26/20

An observation that schoolyard bullies and the more advanced
internet trolls have some things in common:

    CYBER_BULL

Musing upon a hypertext link:

    RECORDING_ASSOCIATIONS






07/16/20

Miscellanious things about Korean Dramas, much of which has been
sitting on my harddrive for years:

    KDRAMA
    KDRAMA_SITES
    KDRAMA_TRACIN 
    THE_GIRL_WHO_CAN_SEE_SMELLS
    SECRET_GARDEN
    WHAT_HAPPENED_IN_BALI
    DESCENDANTS_OF_THE_SUN
    ANOTHER_OH_HAE_YOUNG
    FIRST_LIFE
    GOBLIN
    WOOKSTER
    KDRAMA_MEDICAL
    BINGING
    BIRDING
    MEMORIES_OF_ALHAMBRA
    PRIME_MINISTER_AND_I


07/13/20

About the documentary "Planet of the Humans" and surrounding controversies--
Renewable energy fans against members of the old guard of "Population Bomb"
true believers.  A bonfire of the inanities, while the globe warms:

    HUMAN_PLANET
    GRIM_AMUSEMENT
    MILK_FLOAT
    BELL_BOTTOM_FUTURES
    RADIOACTIVE_GREENS
    RENNIE_REVIEW
    HUMAN_FINISH
    AFTER_THE_HUMAN_PLANET
    WARMING_TO_NUKES




06/12/20

About Glen O'Brien, an exceedingly minor figure that managed to get around:

    SCENESTER
    BACONBITS

    WEIRD_MONEY




06/12/20

Some thoughts on Alan Moore's The Watchmen, prompted by the cable
television sow that I haven't seen:

    WHO_WILL_CRITICIZE
    RACIST_RORSCHACH
    TOKEN_REMARKS
    SENSE_OF_CLOSURE
    GESTALT_CLOSURE
    THAT_OLD_FRONTIERSMAN




06/09/20

New York City, historically an "engine of culture".
A sketch of a historical timeline of cultural developments
there:

    ENGINE_OF_CULTURE

Daniel Davies at crookedtimber argues for arts investment
as a kind of venture capital:

    CROOKED_ART_INVESTMENT




04/07/20

Dreaming about programming in-jokes from an alternate reality:

    WEDDING_PARTY




04/03/20

Reviewing what I thought about the Covid-19 threat, circa March 2020.
My impression was it was being underplayed.

    CORONAVIRUS_HALO




03/07/20

Virtue signalling from the left, vice signalling from the right,
(shut-up and get out of here signalling from crookedtimber):

    VIRTUE_SIGNALLING




01/16/20

Suspicion that the sudden Bernie/Sanders feud was intentionally
amplified by the bad guys:

    ELECTION_FOLLIES

"Flood the zone with shit", close relative of the gish-galosh:

    ZONE_SHIT




12/06/19

Small bit about Robert E. Howard, a poem that seems autobiographical:

    DARK_DEEP_EYES




10/18/19

Q: is Scientism a sneer ala psuedo-science, or a
reasonable name for science-based belief systems?

    SCIENTISM




10/18/19

Added:

    WILDBERGER_MATH

    INFINITE_WILDBERGER

    CEREBROUSUS_MATHEMATICA




10/09/19

Added:

    85_STEPS




10/02/19

Added:

    ANTI_NUCLEAR_CLOWN




10/02/19

Bertrand Russell, the _Principia Mathematica_, the suspicion that
the platonic idealism that haunts mathematics might be dubious:

    MATHISM
    THE_DOCTRINE_OF_POSTULATES
    SCARCE_RIGOR
    WHIG_OUT
    MATH_SIMPLE


09/26/19

The dumbest possible way to be anti-nuclear is to favor closeing
operating plants before there's alternative clean energy capacity
in place:

    WRONG_TO_THE_CORE

And Bernie Sanders, of course...

    NUCLEAR_BERN

09/19/19

On moratoriums on new technologies:

    MORATECH
    REGULATING_NEWTECH
    AMISH
    FANG
    POURNELLE
    TECHNO_CRACKS


08/30/19

The Saint story, "The Golden Journey":

    GOLDEN_JOURNEY
    WANDERVOGEL
    GOLDEN_ROAD
    GOLDEN_FOOD

                                       09/22/19

    GOLDEN_BELLOC




06/25/19

The classic Korean drama from 2007:

    COFFEE_PRINCE

05/24-29/19

About a Korean Drama "romcom" that I find strangely engaging
despite the routine quality of a lot of the motifs:

    HER_PRIVATE_LIFE

The Theodore Sturgeon story about a blocked artist, and the problems
with writing about an existential/philosophical crisis:

    TO_HERE_AND_THE_EASEL

Thinking about a syndrome of mine: I'm sometimes sure I've
written something here that I haven't.

    MISSING_PIECES

Phoney, forced "suspense" in one of my favorite movies,
"To Catch a Thief":

    TO_CATCH_A_FAKE



05/08/19

A Korean Drama on the theme of cosmetic surgery,
which seems to be a ubiquitous feature of Korean
culture that they often avoid talking about:

    GANGNAM_BEAUTY








05/05/19

Repetition in music has been on the upswing (Colin Morris, etc):

    REPEAT




05/05/19

Teenagers assigned to read "Neuromancer":

    YESTERDAYS_REVOLUTIONS




05/05/19

The messy aspect of the great novels...

    UNGAINLY_MESSES

    MOBY_DICK

Interpreting internet discussion site downvotes...

    DOWNVOTE_CLUB

Ambiguity in art, specifically t-shirt designs:

    INDEFINITE_DEPTHS

A t-shirt design with problematic alternate meaninds:

    SYMBOLS_FOR_PERL

My fashion sense fixated early:

    BLACK_JET

An aside about Long Island beaches:

    FIRE_ISLAND




04/08/19

About William S Arens, my old Anthropology prof:

    ARENS_101

Arens was skeptical about the existence of the custom of cannibalism:

    MAN-EATING_MYTH

Arens defending the right of anthropologists to follow their own judgement:

    ARENS_VIEW_FROM_OUT

Asia is in the shadow of the Hollywood Blond, or so it seems to me:

    WHITE_KOREAN




04/05/19

The Gallup poll on public opinion on nuclear power--
safety fears would not seem to be the key factor:

    NUCLEAR_GALLUP

04/05/19

Hillary shill's circa 2016:

    BROCKPUPPETS


03/13/19

Greatly expanded this piece, after looking up what Sartre
actually said about Munich 1972:

     SYMPATHY_EXPRESS


03/09/19

Abbreviations using the beg-inning syl-lables:

    BEGSYLS




03/09/19

A fine bit of outsider critical terminology:

    IDIOT_PLOT

02/15/19

Some arguments against specialization, which I at
first thought were just polemicism disguised as
psychological case studies, but it does sound like
there's some decent data that supports it as well:

    POLYMATH
    POLYMYTH

02/11/19

From psychobabble to poetry: setting the phrases from the list of
cognitive biases into pentameter.

    COGNITIVE_BIAS_PENTAMETER

The beginning of a critical look at the "cognitive biases":

    COGNITIVE_BIAS_BIASES


01/16/19

A quote from "Excursions in Number Theory" from 1966, that
is unusually appropriate in an age of digital cryptography:

    EXCURSIONS_IN_THEORY

Bertrand Russell arguing that linguistic ambiguities are inevitable
because there's always a wide range of meaning in play, potentially
one per individual:

    LINGUISTIC_LOGIC

Bertrand Russell, from the same piece, doing a strong pull-quote
you could use to promote the idea of logical languages, though
he doesn't really believe in them:

    LOGICAL_LANGUAGE

Russell and Whitehead's "Principia Mathematica", and
Richard Feynman's commentary on the relationship between
physics and math:

    CERTAINTY

The dreams of a logical languages a faith in word magic?

    LINGUISTOLOGY

A small point I've complained about before:
I have trouble remembering the dates for WWI:

    WWI

02/18/19

Looking at "female" fiction from a double outside view:

    MY_SLIGHTLY_SYMPATHETIC_EYE

About the Korean romcom "What's the Matter With Secretary Kim?":

    SECRETARY_KIM

02/02/19

Working through the Ben Tarnoff book, "The Bohemians" (2014)--
about the San Francisco scene, circa the 1860s:

    SILVER_HEART
    OUTCROPPED
    BEING_REAL_BEING_KNOWN
    SF_BOHEMIA_1860S
    PIECE_OF_TWAIN
    BOHEMIAN_ZERO
    BOHEMIAN_GENIUS

02/24/19

A bunch of stuff about my reservations about what gets called
feminism. There are some aspects of the story in danger
of being written out of history:

    MALE_FEMINISM_TRAP
    EXPLAINING_FEMINISM
    BACK_TO_THE_PAST
    MULTI_FEMINISMS
    ASTERIX
    WAVICALISM
    ALL_ABOUT_ME_AND_FEMINISM
    UNDERGROUND_BEFORE_NET
    LESBIAN_SEPRATIST_RADIO
    LESBIAN_RADIO_REACTIONS
    FEMINISM_IS_THE_THEORY
    PENIS_ENVY
    A_BRIEF_HISTORY_OF_SEX
    GOOD_VIBRATIONS
    MILITANT_VANILLAS
    LEATHER_MENACE
    PIANISSIMO
    OBJECTIFIED
    ESSENTIAL_EROCOS
    EROCOS_FIFE
    GEEKFEMINISM
    FEMINISM_OF_CHOICE
    BEAUTY_MYTH
    PATRIARCHY


01/17/19

A few modern consumer items that don't suck:

    WONDERS_OF_THE_MODERN_WORLD

A quest through the local brick and mortar, looking for knife
sharpening equipment:

    SHARP_BUT_DULL

My distaste for online shopping:

    NET_OF_LAST_RESORT

                                           05/10/19

More talking about Stuff: Kotobuki dishes.

    GREEN_BOWLS




01/09/19

About a break-through Korean drama from 2002,
popular throughout Asia:

    WINTER_SONATA
    WINTER_DESCENDS_ON_ASIA
    FORBIDDEN_LOVE

The terrible threat lurking in every Korean drama: crossing the street.

    DIABLO_EX_MACHINA




12/21/18

A brief review of the meme concept-- skeptical that it explains anything.

    MEMES




12/21/18

A somewhat cryptic summary of Hellen Longino's ideas about
the practice of science:

    HELLEN_LONGINO

12/21/18

Reviewing the case against reason, and suggesting
it may be all too well known:

    CROOKED_REASON

Faith in reason as psychological armor for bad ideas
(but it's not the only such armor, is it?):

    ID_OF_REASON

Sketching an idea for the ultimate public debate
web-site:

    ARENA_COMBAT




12/15/18

"Object-Oriented Ontology" and Graham Harman and the human comedy:

    OOONT
    HARMANS_WAY
    EVERY_OOONT
    INTO_THE_OOONT
    MULHALL_ON_HARMAN
    HARMAN_CRAFT
    OBJECTS_THROUGH_THE_ANIMIST
    SINCERE_OBJECT




11/29/18

Richard E. Geis' most famous creation:

    ALTER_EGO




11/13/18

An angle on the history of software, artificial intelligence
vs "intelligence augmentation":

    GRACE_MACHINES

A couple of the software luminaries:

    JMC
    ENGLEBART


11/11/18 - 11/12/18

Once again, on the "critical information infrastructure for democracy",
beginning with some dicussion at crookedtimber:

    INFOSTRUT
    INFOCURE

Strategies for salvaging the anonymous voice:

    ANON_SALVAGE

And more strategies, plus the new term "verified ID":

    INFO_VERITAS

If Twitter fails, does anyone really care?

    TWITTING_FATE

A brief recap of me being ahead-of-my-time again:

    CASSANDRAS_ANONYMOUS

Nicholas Gruen talks up a site that tried to score you
for epistemic virtue:

    EPISTEMIC_VIRTUE_SCORE

An ancient greek democratic institution and possible solution for the
modern world: deliberation by a body of randomly selected citizens:

    SORTITION

If the truth will out, then...?

    JUSTICE_FROM_TRUTH

Defender of Jordan Peterson remind of Freud-apologists:

    A_JORDAN_PETERSON_OF_THE_MIND

A familiar tale: to win someone over you must tell a better story.

    THE_STORY_OF_STORIES

The Backfire Effect was oversold, and there's an odd reluctance for
people to grasp that:

    DOUBLE_BACKFIRE


11/09/18 - 11/12/18

About Julia Galef's Long Now presentation,
"The Solider and the Scout":

    GALEF

Against the defenders of optimism and positive delusions:

    GALEF_VS_THE_DELUSION_DELUSION

Aristotle on the importance of metaphors:

    META4

Dan Kahan's data, purporting to show that greater
understanding increases lack of understanding (or
something like that):

    UNDERSTANDING_UNDERSTOOD

Is Galef's idea we can just skip fighting?

    FORCED_MARCH

More evidence that nice liberals can't be bothered with world politics:

    RUSSIAN_FLIP

Redefining the terms to avoid admitting that you were wrong:

    FREE_TO_REGULATE

An intellectual parlour game
"Is there anything you've changed your mind about?"

    FLIP_TEST

A conveniently clear, and unambiguous case where I can say
I changed my mind:

    SOCIALIZED_MEDICNE

An outline of thoughts about phrases like "cognition in the wild"
and "motivated reasoning":

    WILDNOTES

From piece of mine "Toward a Smarter We" from 2014:

    WE_SMART
    WE_DETAIL
    WE_BIFURCATE




10/24/18

Some examples of recent (2017/2018) anime, that are
problematic, but I think a bit lighter on the
suckage than usual:

    FORCED_MELANGE
    ANGOLMOIS
    JUUSHINKI_PANDORA
    AKANESASU_SHOUJO


10/22/18

Some bits about a flare-up of the anti-nuclear faith at the
usually more level-headed crookedtimber, from back in 2015:

    NUCLEAR_DERANGEMENT




10/21/18

On the occasion of my second reading of Aristotle's "Poetics":

    ARISTOTLE_POETICS
    DEJA_ARISTOTLE
    ARISTOTELIAN_METHOD
    ARISTOTELIAN_LINES
    ARISTOTLE_BEGINS
    ARISTOLE_ENDS
    ARISTOTLE_EPISODES
    ARISTOTLE_REVERSED
    ARISTOTLE_RECOGNIZED
    ARISTOTLE_DOUBLED
    ARISTOTLE_WART
    ARISTOTLE_CHARACTER
    ARISTOTLE_SENSES
    ARISTOTLE_ADVISES
    ARISTOTLE_TWOPART
    ARISTOTLE_FOURTYPES
    ARISTOTLE_CHORUS
    ARISTOTLE_EMOTES
    ARISTOTLE_SILENCES
    ARISTOTLE_SPEAKS
    ARISTOTLE_UNIFIES
    ARISTOTLE_FAKES
    ARISTOTLE_STANDARDS
    ARISTOTLE_SATIRE
    ARISTOTLE_POSSIBILITIES
    ARISTOTLE_IMITATED
    ARISTOTLE_EVOLUTION
    SPECTACULAR_ARISTOTLE
    ARISTOTLE_COMPOSED

    POETIX

    BUTCHERS_REPUBLIC

    KOREAN_POETICS

    THE_TWIST

    DEUS_EX_STATUARY

    TWISTED

    CONJURE_WIFE




10/06/18

A run-down of Thomas Kuhn's "Structures" from memory:

    THE_PARADIGM_PARADIGM




10/06/18

Falsification and Friends:

    FALSIES
    SCIENTIFIC_METHODS
    FEYNMAN_ON_PHILOSOPHY
    FALSIES_AGAIN
    THE_SUN_UNCHAINED
    PARADIGMS_EVALUATED

10/03/18

Going back over my notes on "Social Epistemology":

    SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY
    SEP_SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY
    SOCIAL_EPISTEMOLOGY_FIVE
    HELLEN_LONGINO


09/24/18

In the Korean television drama, relationships develop in a straight-line,
male lead gets together with the female lead:

    LANDING_PADS

09/13/18

A web-design idea I used to like, gather external links
in one place that you can link to:

    WEB_VESTIBULE

07/29/18

If you say "Corto Maltese is my hero!" what precisely does that mean?
The often loose connection between fictional and real ideals:

    THE_CASE_OF_CORTO_MALTESE


07/11/18

Added:

    BERNIE_HAS_NO_BLACK_PROBLEM
    BERNIE_JIVE
    BERNIE_BLM
    BERNIE_CIVIL


07/10/18

I greatly expanded this page about a corner of the 2016 primaries:

   GERALD_FRIEDMAN

And I wrote a follow-up piece, tracing this tiny "controversy" further:

   LOUD_ATTACKS_QUIET_APOLOGIES



07/07/18

Miscellanious things related to the town of Niles, CA:

    NILES


05/14/18

A fine, never-ending source for internet outrage-fests.
A white girl dared to wear a chinese-style dress to her prom:

    CULTURAL_APPROPRIATION

Some more details of the story:

    CHEONGSAM_RED

About a remarkably vapid New York Times piece discussing cultural
appropriaton in general:

    APPROPRIATION_CULT



05/01/18

Amia Srinivasan discussing the tensions in being a

    PHILOSOPHER_ACTIVIST

Ethnic fetishes, personal intepretations and social significance (if any):

    BLOND_AMBITION

04/17/18

Amia Srinivasan on sex-positive feminism and the problem of
volition in a world without perfect freedom:

    BEYOND_THE_BLUE

For Srinivasan, either criticism of a sexual desire is fair
game, or we regard it as fixed and unchangeable:

    BEYOND_CRITICISM_WITHIN_REACH

The changing status of gay men taken as a model for social change:

    THE_QUEER_WAVE

Polarizing echo chambers, and the duel of internet feminists with
mens-rights freaks:

    WORST_ARE_FILLED

English makes it easy to express causal relations, even when
that's a dubious claim:

    WORDS_OVER_THE_CRACKS




04/10/18

About a particular re-tread of the classic mecha-anime:

    GUNDAM_SEED

The concept of a "new type" from the original Gundam:

    NEWTYPE

The powered-armor idea and japanese anime:

    MECHA




04/02/18

More ranting about a modern-day defender of Freud:

    CIRCULAR_FREUD


03/26/18

The world-building underlying Kim Stanley Robinson's "2312":

    KSR_2312

Intra-solar system transit in KSR's "2312":

    RIDE_A_COMET

An old idea at this point to get from ground to orbit:

    SPACE_ELEVATOR

Basic orbital mechanics, changing orbits with minimal energy
expenditure:

    HOHMANN_TRANSFER

The O'Neill colony concept:

    INSIDE_OUT_WORLDS

Strafford Beer's idea for a computerized, networked control
system for an industrial economy:

    PLATFORM_FOR_CHANGE




03/08/18

About the documentary "Merchants of Doubt" (loosely based
on the book of the same title):

    DOUBT_THE_MOVIE




03/08/18

Three from the Winter 2018 anime season all about the texture of existence...

    "Yuru Camp"                  aka "Laid-Back Camp"
    "Sora yori mo Tooi Basho"    aka "A Place Further than the Universe"
    "Koi wa Amaagari no You ni"  aka "Love is like After the Rain."

    MENAGE_EXISTENCE

Second seasons are rare in anime these days, but...

    SECONDS_EXIST

The horror of the "moe blobs":

    BEWARE_OF_THE_BLOB

A trick (thought experiment?) in fiction composition, if you
flip the gender of characters what happens to the story?

    GENDER_INVERSION

A minor piece about my personal preference to avoid video
streaming in favor of download:

    BUFFER_YOURSELF

                                (My apologies if you'd like to see a piece
                                about actual "self buffering".  I should
                                figure out what that would mean, sometime.)



01/19/18

Dennis Dutton commenting on reaction to his book:

    ART_INSTINCT

Sketching out an outline of possible positions on
nature/nuture and the arts:

    ARTS_OF_BIOLOGY_AND_CULTURE




01/16/18

Frederick C. Crews against the Freudoids:

    THE_ANTI_FREUD_CREW
    APPY_POLY_OGGIES
    SEXREP_TO_SEXREV


01/02/18

Pinker's "Blank Slate", from around the edges...

    PINK_SLATE
    PINKER_BIOLOGY
    PINK_ART
    TWIN_STUDIES

01/16/18

Some quotes from John Quiggin's piece on Steven Pinker's
"Blank Slate":

    QUIGGIN_BIOLOGY
    QUIGGIN_TRADES


Squib about a possible pattern in intellectual activity
peaking in the late-Naughts:

    2008


01/07/18

About writing Skip Beat fanfic, no less:

    KIMIKO_FALLS

12/31/17

Added:

    RISK_STRATEGY

12/10/17

Added:

    TROOPERS
    TROOPERS_AGAINST_SEXISM
    TROOPERS_AGAINST_RACISM

    EPISTOCRACY




12/07/17

"The Trashing of Margaret Mead" by Shankman, on a battle from
the Culture War: Derek Freeman's attack on Mead's work in Samoa:

    TRASHING_MEAD
    TRASHING_DEEPER

    THE_FREUD_SYNDROME
    SYNDROME_SYNDROME


12/07/17

Charles Stross laid down some challenges concerning the venerable
form of "space opera".  I try to play along...

    ASTRO_ARIA
    NULL_R
    GAMESTERS_OF_TERRA
    UPLOAD_AND_AWAY
    ALIENS_AT_PLAY
    ROMANCE_BY_DESIGN


12/07/17

Some grumpy complaints about the "smart phone" craze:

    SWIPE_AND_WIPE
    TOUCH_ME_NOT




12/04/17

An old bit about an old "J-Pop Summit", that last one
to be held in Japantown:

    JPOP_SUMMIT


11/17/18

A set of music to start the day, every day... for awhile:

    THE_MUSIC_OF_ALWAYS
    UNDERNEATH_THE_ALWAYS

Narcissistic bit about my (out?) waves of interest in Japanese pop-culture:

    JWAVES


12/04/17

An E. Phillips Oppenheim book from 1937, a fantasy about averting
the on-coming World War by a conspiracy armed with super-weapons:

    DUMB_GODS_SPEAK




12/03/17

John le Carre novel from 2003, arguably playing up to the Truthers:

    ABSOLUTE_FRIENDS


12/03/17

The poetry of techno-babble:

    CHROMIATIC
    DYSON_LULLABY


11/27/17

Given Daniel Kahneman's work on human cognitive traps,
how would you fix or ameliorate the problems?

    BEYOND_KAHN

Fields of expertise bring with them shared cognitive traps:

    BLIND_FIELD

Hutchinson's "cognition is socially distributed" considered as
a kind of poetry rather than a great insight in itself:

    POETRY_OF_JARGON




11/27/17

And what the hell, might as well push out the David Bowie material from 2016 or so:

    DAVID_BOWIE
    DUKING
    JUST_OVER_UNDERGROUND
    MISMATCHED_PAIR
    CULT_OF_BOWIE


11/27/17

Prompted by a remark by THE_DARK_KING,
a small piece about the 2016 film:

    ARRIVAL


11/14/17

About some paradoxes concerning parody:

    PARODY_PARADOX


11/14/17

j-culture (anime, jpop, etc) and american culture:

    JUNDER_JOVER




10/27/17

For *decades* I've been thinking about breaking out some material
about the novel "Babel-17" out into it's own node like this
(originally-- and I mean *originally*, in the first doomfile)
it was part of DELANY:

    BABEL-17




10/27/17

Being attacked by your own hand (motif from a Superman DC comic
from ages gone by):

    BY_YOUR_OWN_HAND




10/27/17

The worst job you can take on as a writer: merging together two of
your old drafts:

    HELL_OF_DIFF




10/27/17

Some material about "Space Opera", using material posted to the
Charles Stross blog:

    INTERSTELLAR_OP
    HUMAN_AGENT
    HORSE_SPACE
    DOC_SMITH
    SPACE_RACE


10/27/17

Material about the Tetlock book (originally from two years ago):

    SUPERFORECASTING
    SUPERFORECASTING_ISSUES
    QUESTIONING_DEBIASING


03/23/17

About the old Manga "The Glass Mask", about a young woman working
her way up as an actress:

    GLASS_MASK
    METHOD_ACT


03/07/17 - 03/08/17

The fire at Oakland's "Ghost Ship", and likely consequences:

    GHOST_FIRE

Patti Smith, Haruki Murakami,  "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki":

    MURAKAMI_SMITH

Sartre criticizing Marxism as relgion-- some questions about his jargon.
Fashions in translation from French?

    MARXISM_IS_THE_OPIATE

An exhibition at the Oakland Museum wallows in Nike shoes and
"hip-hop culture":

    SNEAKER_CULTURE


03/07/17

November 9th and beyond:

    HE_WHO_SHALL_NOT_BE_NAMED

All agree: "It's not my fault, and I was right all along."

    RIGHT_ALL_ALONG

Lefty protest in Oakland, we lost because Obama (?):

    OBAMAS_LEFT_BEHIND

Causality going through the economic channel?  Still seems weak:

    BECAUSE_OBAMA

Many tiny things, if they had been different...

    ELECTORAL_COUNTERFAC

We were told she was the safe pick:

    SAFE_BETS

When the polls are wrong, where do you go from there?

    POLLS_AND_REALITY

Krugman's scurrilous attacks on Bernie:

    KRUGMAN_BERNIE_WARS

The economist who dared to predict big changes from big changes:

    GERALD_FRIEDMAN

"Most liberal policy wonks"?  Like who?

    UNICORNY

It's the Overton Window, stupid:

    UNICORNY_COMMENTS


                                        05/04/17

Rebecca Solnit, victim of Hillary-derangement:

    UPSET

The forgotten (?) context of Whitewater:

    WHITEFOAM

03/07/17

Japanese consumer products just seem better... perhaps they have
respect for the spirit of the object?

    ANIMISTS

Struggling to buy a mop without buying into a chain:

    MOP_HEAD

Cassabella mop debacle and product placebos:

    GETTING_A_HANDLE


03/07/17

Revisiting the Hans Reiser case from years ago.
A legal system under trial.

    HANS_REISER
    FILE_SYSTEMS_REISING
    REISERS_GUILT
    LINUX_REISING
    OUTLINE_OF_EVIDENCE
    JUDGING_JURIES
    LETS_PLAY_JURY
    THE_LEGENDARY_TWINKIE
    GEEK_DEFENSE
    ALTERNATE_REALITIES_REISING

The incompetence of software geeks dealing with physical
problems...

    WATER_REISING


11/02/16

Evaluating critics based on tone...

    TONE_POLICE

Interpreting the line breaks in poetry:

    BROKEN_STEM




11/02/16

V. Vale's thesis that punk is essentially about eternal rebellion:

    PUNK_STATION

Was punk a "spontaneous worldwide" thing?  My take is it started in NY,
but spread weirdly fast...

    WORLDWIDE_SPONTANEOUS




11/02/16

Haruki Murakami's

    WINDUP_BIRD

Aging brit music journo jumps on M-train, and goes splat on the tracks:

    UNTRAINED_PENMAN





10/28/16

The Doctor Strange comic:
(1) suceeding waves of creators did okay with it;
(2) it works inspite of an excess of power

    DOCTOR_STRANGE


10/28/16

Otaku as "gods of consumerism", a proposed standard for anime
"something to learn from"?

    OTAKU_GODS




10/28/16

Miscellanious stuff I bought circa 2014...

    AQUISITIVE




10/17/16

Added:

    THE_FUTURE_IS_NOW

    MILLENNIAL_FIRE




10/12/16

So, back in 2014, I was talking about wrapping up this
project... on the off chance that anyone is wondering
what happened to that:

(1) recently I got involved with fixing-up the emacs
lisp code I use to edit this stuff, and now that it's
working better, I'm finding I'm more interested in
writing in this format.

(2) Also, I gave up on the experiment of "blogging" at the
dailykos-- mainly I quit as a small protest about the
rollout of new software ("DK5"), but Markos demonstrating
he can't tell a "better democrat" when he sees one was
really the last straw (actually I've got multiple problems
with the place, maybe I should write something about that...).

Anyway, here's some recent additions:

The idea that Japan is monoethnic is at best an exaggeration:

    MULTIETHNIC_JAPAN
    MULTIETHNIC_MEANING
    KOREAN_JAPANESE
    MULTIETHNIC_JAPANESE_KOREAN
    MULTIETHNIC_AINU
    NATIONAL_VOIDS
    JAPANESE_RACISM
    WHITEFACE

Bunch of stuff about the outrage at the thought of Scarlett Johansson
playing Major Motoko in a Hollywood "Ghost in the Shell":

    WHITEGHOST
    RECALCITRANT_GHOST
    GHOST_REACH
    WHITEGHOST_TRACES
    PAN_HOLLYWOOD
    MAJOR_ISSUE
    GHOST_QUEEN
    WHITE_CHILD_SPEAKS
    LATIN_TASTE
    JAPANESE_SHELL
    DOUBLE_CHEN
    WOODEN_CORE


10/10/16

A mystery novel from the 40s, set in New York's Chinatown:

    CHINESE_RED
    HITE_OF_WISDOM
    CHINESE_RED_SPACE

A novel from 1906, "Blindfolded" with scenes from San Francisco's
Chinatown:

    CHINATOWN_BLINDFOLDED

Ye olde master of the Yellow Peril:

    SAX_ROHMER

Some remarks from "Bohemian San Francisco" about SF's Chinatown
from 1916:

    CHINATOWN_EDWORDS

Description of Honlulu's "Chinatown" area, from the first Charlie Chan
novel from 1921:

    CHINATOWN_HONOLULU

The Charlie Chan phenomena, and the claim he was based on a Real Detective named:

    CHANG_APANA

    MOVING_CHAN

A really brilliant black comic actor:

    STEPIN_FETCHIT

A woman lying about rape that lead to a racial lynching:

    MASSIE_CASE

Bit about Tongs working through "Social Clubs" now:

    NEW_CHINATOWN_SF

The photographer of pre-earthquake Chinatown.
Lousy ethics, but were it not for him we'd have nothing:

    ARNOLD_GENTHE


10/08/16

About a Bucky Sinister book from 2014:
    SINISTER_TIME

10/07/16

A series of Japanese television shows about a female doctor:
    DOCTOR_X


10/06/16

Takashi Murakami's ideas about Japanese art:
    SUPERFLAT


10/03/16

NYC was *once* an "engine of culture", but now it's...
    STALLED

David Byrne rails about NYC under the weight of the "great inversion":
    BYRNING_INVERSION


06/10/16

The series by Charles Stross, "doing amber":
    MERCHANT_PRINCES


07/30/15

An odd dream about contending with an accidental AI:
    OVER_THE_ICE


07/30/15

The Korean comedy-drama version of "Bel Ami":
    BEL_AMI


07/30/15

The roots of "cyber-punk", according to John Shirley:
    CYBER_ROOTS

07/21/15

Neustadt and May's book on principles for decision-making
using historical perspective:

    THINKING_IN_TIME
    ALLURING_ANALOGS
    CUBA

07/13/15

About 70s domestic "terrorists" (the Weathermen and friends), and
the difficulty of evaluating whether they achieved anything at all
worthwhile:

    BOMB_WEATHER
    CRAZY_WIND
    PREVAILING_CLIMATE
    RADICALLY_SCREWED


05/19/15

Hanging out with John and Yoko in the early 70s:
    JILL_AND_YOKO


03/28/15

"How to Use Guys with Secret Tips"
    USE_GUYS

Back to The Clash:
    DEATH_OR_GLORY


02/06/15

Borderlands Books, an odd example of a business model threatened
by a new local minimum wage law:

    BORDERLANDS_FADES


02/04/15

Julia Vinograd, beat poet of Berkeley:
    VINOGRAD


02/04/15

Flashes of mysterious insight and plodding, laborious reasoning.
Using my experience with Eight Queens problem as an example:

    EIGHT_QUEENS
    SOLUTION_EIGHT
    OVER_EIGHT


11/17/14

A review of Norman Finklestein's latest book:
    HOLOCAUST_INDUSTRY_FUNNIES




11/13/14

"My Secret Hotel" (2014), a Korean television show:
    SECRET_HOTEL
    PETTY_TRIUMPHS_CLEAN_HANDS




11/10/14

Sapir-Whorf and Korzybski again:
    WHORF_THREE

Anti-Nuclear Yellow Journalism:
    NUCLEAR_YELLOW


10/29/14

China, pollution, climate change, photovaltaics and nuclear
development:

    CHINESE_ENERGY

10/26/14

The evils of Amazon:
    THE_PAX_VOBISCUM_BITE
    WHERE_THE_AGNOSTICS_SLINK


Arguing for nuclear power, though you may be outside the
bounds of accepted opinion:

    OVERTON_OUTLANDS




08/28/14

    GIANT_ROBOT
    PROTO_GIANT

    THE_NEW_KAWAII
    KAWAII_CREEPS




08/17/14

Added:

    ON_DEFENSIBLE_BORDERS


08/17/14

    NOT_PRO_ISRAEL
    RUST_PRIMER
    SIMPLE_PROBLEMS
    BOYCOTT_WHILE_YOU_WAIT


07/24/14

    ENGAGING_WORLD
    CURMUDGEON_MANIFESTO
    REALITY_GAP


07/23/14

    BAKEMONOGATARI
    TSUNDERE
    OTAKU_BELLE
    GORNICK
    CONSCIOUS_SKIN
    NEW_LOVE
    RED_ON_BLACKMAIL

07/23/14

    MEANIES_OF_PRODUCTION
    IDEOLOGY_VS_IDJITS




The 14th of the "final" pushes... I'm feeling the temptation
to Write More Stuff, but also feel like there's very little
point in continuing with this.


04/19/14

    ON_THE_SCHOLES_OF_PARADOXY
    ARTS_AND_KRAFT
    SIN_OF_FORM

    BAY_WINDOW
    INSIDE_THE_BARISTA
    MONEY_AND_SOUL
    PRINTERS_INK
    HANGOUT
    MODERN_TIMES
    THE_NEXT_THIRD
    STATIONED

    TRIANGLE_RUN

    MARKET_BLIND

    NEW_YEAR_VOID
    BE_FORGOT

    GUNS_TO_NO_EFFECT

    KRISH


And the 13th in my series of "final" pushes.
This is looking pretty slim, things are definitely
slowing down on this project...

03/22/14

More j-pop culture:

    MAHNSTAAHR
    KYARY
    J_MAZE
    KELP
    PINK_LADY
    HATSUNE_MIKU
    THICK_AND_THIN
    WSJ_KYARY
    HARAJUKU_FACE
    NEW_PEOPLE
    AKB48_COMPLEX
    EVOLVING_FLOWER

03/13/14

The argument that applies against the arguer

    CURVED_ARROWS

03/29/14

Could it be that Penrose was right about quantum effects
and neural functioning?

    ORCHESTRATED_OBJECTIVE_REDUCTION

A case where the makers of an anime struggle to maintain some
respect for the original manga:

    BAKUMAN_FROZEN

James Hansen: environmental hero or nuclear devil?

    JAMES_HANSEN_VS_LINUS_PAULING

The fans of the Korean show "You're Beautiful" seem to project
some elements on the story that aren't at all explicit:

    BAD_GIRLS_FATE



Slowly, ever so slowly creeping toward the 12th push in the "closing"
series... could this be the end?:

02/04/14

Added:

    TOUCH
    LITTLE_BLACK_DRESS
    TOKYO_BANDWAGON
    WHERE_ANGELS_GO_NUN_FOLLOWS
    DRAGON_TATT


02/02/14

Kahneman, on optimism: engine of capitalism, or enemy of sanity?

    OPTIMAL_MIST

01/31/14

Dan Gilbert complains about irrational (or just "irrational"?)
decision-making:

    BERNOULLI_DEFECT

01/14/14


Beverly Gage on recent JFK literature:

    GAGE_THEORIES

Oswald as distraction:

    LEAVE_OSWALD_ALONE




The latest wave, number 11 in the series:

01/11/14 - 01/13/14

    SPRINTS
    BLUE_JASMINE
    JUST_KIDS

    BASQUIAT

    TOON_DIAL

    ABDUCTED_LOGIC

    DEWEY_PIERCE

    DEEP_PRIMING

    HARD_AND_DEEP

    SARTRE_HUM

    OSMINKIN


01/05/14

The tenth grand push.  The end is nigh.  Really.

Kahneman gets specific about decision-making with bounded-input
from intuition:

    MEDIUM_SPEED

What kind of thing is next?  What the future of the web?

    NEXT

Freeman Dyson's advice to the young...

    NEED_APPLY

Mark Twain's comments on the Phillipine War:

    AMERICAN_DEPTHS

An early adventure novel that takes socialist ideals
seriously:

    PRINCE_OF_SINNERS

The days when the Futurians infiltrated the government:

    FUTURIAN_NAVY

If you consider software as an art, what does that imply?

    SOFT_ART

My expierence with a variety of forms of social organization:

    SOCIAL_ORGAN

Chomsky and co wrote for the present day:

    FOR_THE_AGES

More about the JFK assasination, the attitude of
the Very Serious toward it, and what that might
imply for the present day world:

    JFK_MODEL
    SMOKING_REPORT
    ZOMBIES_LURK
    HEAD_WOUND

The point that sincerity doesn't imply correctness
(and presumably that earnestness is irrelevant and
perhaps deceptive?):

    SINCERELY_HELD

Another biographical note about my life's cast-of-characters:

    UNICORN_WINGS

Might there be something like "Tales of Beatnik Glory"
to tell, concerning Cellspace?

    CELLSPACE_GLORY

Doing Dumpster Runs for Cellspace:

    DUMPSTER_RUN

An Ex-Model babbles some light-weight tales of degradation,
and reminds of "Blue Jasmine":

    MODEL_X


It is time for the 9th grand push to finish up the grand pushes
of doomfiles material (I'm slowing down a bit here... too much
writing of new stuff, instead of sticking to cleaning up the
old):

11/17/13 - 12/10/13

A bunch of stuff about a minor intellectual controversy from
five or ten years ago: did art have some biological adaptive
advantage as humans evolved, or could it be some sort of accidental
by-product... and what is it good for, anyway?

    ADAPTIVE_ART
    SPANDRELS
    STRAIGHT_PINKER
    PEACOCKS_IN_FIGHT
    BELL_TOLLING
    BLEAK_DINER
    100_MILLENNIUM_MIND
    IMAGINARY_MIND
    CURIOUS_FICTIONS
    MUSIC_AS_MUSIC
    PINK_CHEESECAKE
    DOWN_THE_SCALE

Three pieces of otaku-yaki on the theme of the failings of
reality and yet, the need to engage with it:

    KUSHI_DANKO

Follow up bit, multi-lingual (non-Japanese) puns in
"The World God Only Knows":

    THE_WEISS_VICE

Insane behavior appropriate in certain fictional scenarios:

    FORCED_CIRCUMSTANCE


Back in 2010, a debate on Democracy Now between an alarmist about chemicals
in cosmetics, and a level-headed but dull industry scientist:

    CHEMISTRY
    GASOLINE_DIET


The psychology of conspiracy and anti-conspiracy...

    PARANOIA_GRADE

The New York Magazine is Very Serious about conspiracy theories:

    NY_NAG

Comparing some internet videos, pro and anti conspiracy (both
have probs, but the anti guys are much worse):

    WEAK_HEADS

The moon-landing-was-faked syndrome:

    PAPER_MOON



The counter-sexual sexuality of post-WWII US culture...

    DESEXED

Ilya Shambat of alt.gothic, talking about a later-day Morrison
clone as the real deal *because* he's so far out of sync with
present-day trends:

    TRUE_SELVES

Late adopters don't get stuck with orphans:

    LATE_ADOPTER

Early experiences with early portable micro-computers:

    PIVOT

Commuter Bicycle experiments, e.g. the Trek Soho:

    COMMUTER_BIKE

Frederick Pohl on A.E. van Vogt (who went in for Dianetics,
but balked at the Scientology religious scam):

    VAN_VOGT


Comparing two quotations, another case where more is not less:

    AXIS_OF_COMPARISON

Comparison of the issue of explicit violence in horror movies,
and explicit sex in anime:

    SPLATTER_DEATH


Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow":

Kahneman has salesmanship problems I think, being sloppy about
the all/many distinction is not something you expect of a scientist:

    THE_GREAT_KAHN_KNOWS

Money-on-the-mind changes people's reactions:

    MONEY_PRIME

Kahneman points to ideas by Daniel Gilbert (and Spinoza?),
arguing you've gotta believe to understand:

    SPINOZA_CYCLE


Writing classes, and the standard advice "find your voice", etc.

    VOICE_KNOW_TELL




11/16/13

And on with part 8 of working towards the great "wrap-up" (maybe):

A brief (?) outline of the cellspace saga, with
any eye on object lessons about styles of organization:

    CELLSPACE

Don Joyce's uncontroversial version of the always controversial
JFK assasination:

    ASSASSINATION_DON

Beginning to work my way through "Thinking Fast and Slow",
by Daniel Kahneman:

    FAST_SLOW_AND_SLOWER
    ZION_FADES
    KAHNEMAN_SLOWLY
    ONE_FOOT_IN_ZION
    FIRE_MIND
    EXPERIMENT_FAIL
    TEST_FLAIL
    MENTAL_ENERGY
    GROUNDER
    SYSTEM_3

Feeling trapped by living circumstance into a middle-class conformity
(or a sort)

    THE_HIGH_ROAD_TRAP

art/politics/hedonism:

    TRINITY

"Never let anyone fly under you": look out for the threat from below:

    FLY_DOWN

Complaining about Thomas Friedman.  Now I am a real blogger.

    FRIED_MAN

Inventing languages to write poetry in them;

    NEWBIE

Minor joke in search of a context:

    HORNS_OF_DILEMMA


Nuclear Winter, the TAAPS study, a failure (?) of science and
social policy:

    SCIENTIFIC_WINTER


Lester Bangs on the subject of chops:

    BANGS_CHOPS


It looks like it's worse than it looks, doesn't it?

    MANN_AND_ORNSTEIN


An example of an anime/managa in no hurry to resolve or even to fully state it's premise:

    MYSTERIOUS_GIRLFRIEND_X


"Cognition in the Wild", cognition, a socially distributed phenomena:

    WILD_COG




11/03/13

Part 7 of our continuing series "The End of the doomfiles,
really soon now":

Working over Plato's Gorgias:

    GORGIAS
    FALSE_KNOWLEDGE
    THAT_WHICH_KNOWLEDGE_MAKES
    MISSING_BODY
    ALL_GREEK
    PLATONIC_ART
    PLATONIC_EXERCISE
    PARALLEL_CHILDREN
    JUSTICE_HAPPY
    ENOUGH_IS_ENOUGH
    HAPPY_SCIENCE
    CALISTHENICS

    BREAKING_BADNESS
    THE_TRUE_KNOWLEDGE



Small bit about Tanenhaus, the reason the New York Times
Book Review has seemed increasingly useless of late:

    TANENHAUS

Longer bit (but no less pointless) complaining about an old
NYT review of a Krugman book, as executed by a Stanford History
dweeb:

    KENNEDYS_CONSCIENCE


Now for some commentary on a really weight subject:
discussing an early William Powell film based on one of
the worst popular mystery novels ever written:

    GREENE_MURDER_FILM

The boredom/seriousness tradeoff, this time in the anime world:

    5MM_PER_HOUR

An old thought about differing cultural transmission lags
in different fields:

    INTERNATIONAL_LAG

How does one measure the popularity of music?

    THE_POPULAR_QUESTION

Tracing literary influences can be complicated by legal fears
of plagarism accusations, etc:

    LEGAL_BLOCK


Software design, preserving botches for the sake of
backwards compatibility:

    THE_MAKE_STORY

Esperanto and The Shadow:

    LA_OMBRO


Trying to apply the 'method of light' to the question of
internet identities:

    APPLIED_LIGHT

A Walt Whitman quote (twas ever thus... maybe):

    HOLLOWNESS_AT_HEART


What would Steve Jobs do next?  (Marketing visuals):

    JOBS_EXTRAPOLATED


Going high and low at the same time, using the low to
support the high, and the high to excuse the low:

    BARBELL


Trying to scrounge excuses to use an RDBMS as an application back-end:

    HOME_BASE
    HOME_BASE_TECHNOTES

A technical religious war not often commented on, the C programmers
vs the database people:

    DATABASE_WORMS



The basics of...

    MARKET_FAILURE


Out in the Ghost World, wanting to have A People:

    HOLLOW_LANDS

The appeal of fireworks?

    WORKING_FIRE

Various reflections of Holmes:

    MIRROR_MEN

A particular variant, an American Holmes:

    NERO_WOLFE
    WOLFES_OFFICE

Charles Peirce talking about the One, the Two and the Many:

    ABC

Lierre Keith, author of "The Vegetarian Myth":

    VEGETARIAN_MYTH


10/20/13

And part six of my latest series, "how to increase output by
lowering standards (such as they are)":


New Urban/Free Market alliance makes me quesy:

    UPZONE

10/20/13

Bicycling interactions involving me and/or others:

    PED_DOWN
    TEED_OFF
    BIKE_DOWN
    ARE_YOU_OKAY
    REAR_BRAKE

10/20/13

In the anime realm, it dawns on me that there's now a hybrid of
"serious" SF and moe/otaku silliness:

    STEINS_GATE
    HIGASHI_NO_EDEN
    HENTAI_PRINCE
    MEDIAVORES

10/20/13

An old bit about about zinesters in denial about their roots in
skiffy fandom:

    SKIFFY_ZINES

William Burroughs, "Naked Lunch", copping attitudes about attitude coppers:

    BURROWING_LOWER

Oh, who remembers:

    RETROROCKET

A generation raised to hate radio, thanks to clearchannel and friends:

    RADIO_HATE

Changes in the radio form as it goes on-line:

    RADIO_CHANGE

Some old stuff about the high-tc superconductors, and
gypping Paul Chu out of his share of the Nobel:

    SUPERCONDUCTING_STATE

Accusing the "Distant Reading" crew of...

    SCIENCE_ENVY

Madonna-whore bit:

    MADONNA

Guy named Fry teaching criticism at Yale, hence this clever-clever title:

    FRYING_CRITICISM

Quote from some puply fiction, about sentimentality and morality:

    SENTIMENT_REMAINS

Dreaming about reading:

    READING_DREAMS

Conventional advice about writing:

    WATER_IN_THE_WELL

An old bit from alt-gothic about developing new "dating customs":

    DE_BERGERAC_2000

I'm not sure what this was either.  Probably something about
needing to be comfortable with uncertainty, a common theme with me:

    UNCERTAIN




And now a fifth session (in two installments) of
ramping up output by dropping standards, where I
finish and ship stuff written some time ago:

10/13/13

Lost Who: centralization bad for preservation

    WHO

Anti-Who Conspiracy Theorizing:

    ANTIWHO

Walter Gibson's evident obsession with identity,
and his inability to get a handle on it:

    IDENTICAL_SHADOW

My fantasy about rules making it a requirement to make the real
owners obvious e.g. with the Hearst-owned SF Chroncicle:

    PLACE_FIRST

"Made in USA" labeling is now meaningless:

    WHERE_AMERICA

Using the wall of noise to screen out other sounds:

    NOISEWALL

Charles C. Mann's 1491, environmentalism as preservationism
comes up against the problem that there is no Nature we know
of in a pristine, untouched state:

    NATURAL_PROBLEM

Brief note: Bateson's "Ecology of Mind" and Snyder's thinking
about "Wild Mind" were contemporaneous, and Bateson may need
another look from me in that light:

    ECOLOGY_OF_MIND

The cut-up, floating, disconnected bit format was a very 60s notion:

    MEME_FUSION

We tend to choose technical ideas for social reasons, e.g.
Solar Power Sats were originally rejected by solar enthusiasts
because they were too centralized:

    REAL_REASONS

Another critique of wikipedia, largely hypothetical this time:
post, stall on deletion, wait for print journalists to pick up on it,
then reference them:

    CIRCULAR_REFERENCE

Do I always prefer the first form I encounter out of prejudice,
or is that pattern an illusion: liking the first makes you
search out the second:

    FIRST_ENCOUNTER

Humanism vs Elitism with Sartre's Roquentin:

    HOLDING_ABOVE




10/06/13

Utopians and Marxists and other players,
Erik Olan Wright's "Envisioning Real Utopias",
Chris Carlsson's "Nowtopia", commentary by John Holbo
and Russell Jacoby, plus some Jane Jacobs "Systems
of Survival":

    REALLY_NOWHERE
    UTOPIAN_SPLIT
    UTOPIAN_NET
    INVASION_OF_THE_MARXOIDS
    CAPITALISMS
    THE_OEDIPUS_WRECK
    BIMODAL
    SYSTEMS_OF_SURVIVAL


10/06/13

Apple succeeds by maintaining a monoculture,
Microsoft succeeds by having a monoculture maintained
by the manufactureres, Linux just struggles along...

    MONOCULTURES

The IBM & Microsoft story, as I understand it:

    MICRO_SAGA

While I'm at it, some digs against Macs and Linux:

    THE_UNIVERSAL_SUCK

The 80s movies celebrating intelligence, notably:

    REAL_GENIUS

The Homebrew Computing Club:

    HOMEBREW

Xanadu compared to WWW, Xanadu compared to Gnu:

    XANADU_VS_WORLD


10/06/13

    LIKE_A_STAR

10/06/13

Some material on pulps, Doc Savage and The Shadow:

    DOC_SAVAGE
    TRILLING_TALES
    SHADOWING_WOMEN
    SHADOW_OF_EIGHT_OUT_OF_MIND


    WHITE_DEATH


    OPENENDED


    ADMIRING_THE_MIRROR




09/29/13

And the fourth session of "cleaning the closet"...
And extended sequence of babble about costumes, fashion, etc:

    ROLE_UP
    IMPURE_FORM
    DEMANDING_MEDIUM
    COSTUME
    GREEN_BODY_PAINT
    BLACK_AND_GREEN
    ZERO_HISTORY
    SURPLUS
    DOOM_CLONE
    CARGO
    FASHION_REPORTER
    CRITICAL_FASHION
    WINGS_OF_DANGER
    HALLOWEEN_FASHION
    ROVING_FASHION
    DEAD_FASHION
    GREEN_FASHION
    RIP_FASHION

09/29/13

More wikipedia whining:

    NOTABILITY_PARADOX

09/29/13

The Chroncile has it in for Oakland, perhaps:

    CHRONICLE_FIRE

09/29/13

Little bit of stuff about the phenomena of techies with artsy
pretentions, including Paul Graham, and also some stuff about
startup culture and advice:

    RENAISSANCE_NERDS
    HACKING_UP_PAINTINGS
    NIGHTOWLS
    SPINDOWN




09/29/13

Small philosophical point about abandoning the quest for perfection,
which means that the pursuit of the perfect itself should not be
rejected, just because it's imperfect...

    APPROXIMATELY_PERFECT




09/29/13

Where I've gotten with "the doomfiles" and where I'm going:

    AHEAD_AND_BEHIND
    METHODS_FOR_A_SEARCH




09/29/13

Yet another intellectual exercise assignment for myself:

    LIGHT_EXERCISE

09/29/13

Argue behind or in front of data?

    INSENSIBLE_TWIST

09/29/13

A first cut on the infamous Fukushima incident ("disaster"?):

    FUKUSHIMA




09/29/13

Eric Tomb, interviewing Gary Snyder, discussing Ray Kurzweil:

    TOMB_DUEL

The Juan Gonzales problem (Democracy Now):

    GONZALES_LATER




09/22/13

Back before the beats, the only form of rebellion:

    GANGSTERISM

Traps in the intellectual landscape:

    SANDPITS

A labored attempt at something or other:

    RETHINK

TED talk by RIchard Dawkins-- can our brains reason
beyond our evolved tendencies?

    SEA_OF_PSYCH




And here we go with out third installment of cleaning-the-closet:

09/22/13

A few words about our founder:

    AUGUSTE_COMTE
    CULT_OF_REASON

The "not-invented-here" syndrome, and a classic example of it:

    NIH
    GYROLOCK

Gore Vidal, (1) busting Kerouac for sexual dishonesty
and (2) making snide remarks about "California Buddhism":

    KEROUAC_GORED
    EASTERN_HORN


Arthur Koestler, tales of atrocity runs up against the wall in
the healthy-minded who can't conceive of them:

    IMAGINATION_SHIELD


Riding the singularity curve, means you're always looking up:

    SINGULAR_BEAT

New media, explosions of activity, followed by a retrenching
process... into what state?

    FROM_THE_RETRENCHES

No one really wants any real news:

    OLD_NEWS

We have a possibly encouraging flare-up of a more information-based
journalism coming out of the net:

    NEWS_WAVE

Too many choices cause problems:

    ALLEN_WRENCH_SYNDROME

Peak oil, a form of wishful thinking:

    PEAKED

No one tech needs to be "sustainable", the juggling act is
what we must keep going:

    JUGGLING

Gary Snyder, dislikes the notion of "sustainable development",
Freeman Dyson calls out environmentalists for the "nature knows
best" idea:

    STEADY

Dyson on Descartes vs Bacon; Emerson on Plato:

    WHOLE_IN_ONE

James Howard Kunstler, and his "World Made By Hand" fantasies:

    HANDJOB

Modern primitives/modern civilization; Kunstler and Vale on Tattoos:

    MODERN_CIVILIANS

What name for the "dystopia" that's secretly desired?

    OPTIMISTIC_DOOM

Incorrect predictions are always shrugged off in preference to
abandoning the underlying train of thought: sure, they were wrong
this time, but...

    NEXT_TIME_FOR_SURE

Speculating on what will happen when "peak oil" predictions
crash:

    TRACKED_DOWN

A tale of obvious bullshit that *almost* slipped through my
filters:

    FURRY_DREAMS

The history of "ad hominem" had little to do with "personal attack":

    BACK_TO_AD_HOMINEM


Sabotaging regulation with insincere regulators who will
take the pay check, but not do the job:

    COVERT_DEREGULATION

Coase's Theorem, as used by the right.  I speculate it might similarly
be used to justify socialist-style income redistribution.

    COASIAN_REDISTRIBUTION

Watching new construction on the edge of a superfund site
with some amused interest:

    ONE_BORN

Krugman, struggling with the problem of the age: what are these guys
really thinking?  How do they justify the lies to themself?

    KRUGMAN_BLUES

Me and Cockburn's "The Threat", and Fallows "The Nation":
    COCKBURN

The fall of the Wall gets treated as some sort of grave intellectual
problem for the left, but why not for the right?

    WHAT_ABOUT_THE_WALL

The good-old "out of context quotation" attack, and related
maneubers:

    CHOMSKY_IN_CONTEXT

Chomsky doesn't even get *The Internet*:

    CHOMSKY_DONT_TWEET

Another famous leftist, who had an optimistic thought that the
American Empire might go the way of the British:

    CHALMERS_JOHNSON

The odd-- to me-- phenomena of lefties not getting how
dirty the 2004 presidential election was.  (This one
probably wasn't quite ready to go out, but what the hell.)

    DENIAL_2004

A brief review again of the appeal of free market doctrine:

    LEFTWARD_DRIFT

SF, no matter how serious the theme, must present it in a
light-hearted, jokey style in order to be popular:

    JOLLIEST_ROGER

When epidemology indicates the market is at fault:

    EPIDEMICS

The strangely anti-science, irrational (and not a bit incoherent)
tale of Stoker's:

    DRACULA

The radio drama genre, and some modern examples of it:

    IS_OLD_AGAIN
    NERDS_BEYOND
    EDICT_ZERO





09/08/13

Another exciting pile of stuff written over the last several
years, finished up quickly and shoved out, to what end, no one
can say.


Starting with more not terribly deep babbling
about how disciplines can be corrupted by political engagement...

    SUPPLE_CONFUSIONS

A no doubt odd jump to some Brian Wilson lyrics (hang on to
yourself, etc):

    HANG_ON

Brief note on Doestevsky's The Possessed:

    POSSESSED

Long quotation from The Possessed, about how those
willing to die become god:

    OTHER_SINS

In San Francisco the Democrats are the establishment party,
and isn't really all that left/progressive:

    SIDES_WITHOUT_FLAGS

Arguing with a Mises-erable character on Krugman's blog:

    GOVERNING_MARKET

An accusation concerning women's complaints about men
and gender roles:

    ROLE_OUT

The worst convention of the mystery genre:

    SECOND_MURDER

The overreaching oath as a motivational trick, often used in
anime, etc:

    EMPTY_OATHS

A motivational rap of my own, about moving mountains in ones
head:

    MOVING_MOUNTAINS

The interrupted theme wedges the theme in your head...

    INTERUPTUS

A brief attempt at reading Toynbee:

    TOYNBEE

Charlie Hunter sniped at SF (and not Manhatten?) calling it:

    VANILLA_CITY

Noe Valley, SF, not the most exciting place, and yet with
redeeming features:

    NOE_REASON

A landlord overreaches, ignores a consumer boycott, and loses
(along with everyone else):

    MIKEY_TOM


Phillip Glass, influenced by the Moog?

    MINIMAL_GLASS

Keeping dope illegal to protect local industry:

    PROTECTIONISM

"Unconditional Confidence",  Don't beat up on yourself, etch...

    BABY_SELF


Quibbling about the arguments used by a fellow 9/11 truth debunker:

    SKEPTIC_MOLE




Table-of-contents concerning the Nomster:

    CHOMSKY

A commentor at delong's blog points out some things people don't
seem to get about Chomsky:

    CHOMSKY_PASS

Chomsky conceeds (?) the US is freeest of them all:

    CHOMSKY_FREE


Misc things about Chomsky's critics:

    CHOMSKY_HATE

    AMERICAN_DELONG

"Problems of Knowledge and Freedom":

    DUAL_CHOMSKY

Hawkes tries to pass off the phrase "the chomsky problem":
this is the nature/nuture, conservative/liberal association
abused as a criticism of Chomsky:

    A_CHOMSKY_PROBLEM

Actually, Chomsky regards our Ethical and Linguistic capacities
as both rooted in our nature:

    ETHICAL_FACULTY

Sneering at Posner for trying a weak dig at Chomsky...

    AND_THE_LOSER_IS


Daddy gets to do what he wants:

    DIVINE_RIGHT

Posner insists Nations are above mere human morality:

    NATIONS_ABOVE




08/31/13

Continuing to clean-up: I've been banging through the literally
hundreds of half-way written things I wasn't sure were good
enough to bother with... they weren't going to get any better
rotting on my drive:


To encryption experpts everything looks like an encryption problem,
including internet voting:

    THE_ENCRYPTION_HAMMER

The "aesthete" of the mid-30s, as viewed from below:

    LOST_AESTHETE

Poetry as a proto-philosophic tool; a linguistic theory of
understanding justifies the obsession with stylistic quirks:

    POETIC_FUNCTION

Ginsburg on Joan Adams Volmer: high consciousness

    JOAN_WORTHY

A remarkably bad example of anime "hack//Roots;":
dialog written with fear of commitment to plot:

    MUSHY_ROOTS

You don't just *assume* good faith, not when it matters:

    ASSUME_GOOD_FAITH

Dreams about worrys about booking cellspace during the Burning
Man dead season:

    DREAMS_WITHIN_DREAMS

With comicbooks, a half-century or more of shared background material:
context that can be invoked:

    PERMANENT_EDIFICE

The promethian, technophilic view of history:

    PROMETHIAN_DREAM

About Paul Romer's Long Now talk-- if odd things like "Hong Kong"
can become such great successes, maybe we should create more odd
things...

    NEW_HONG_KONG

Wisdom more beautiful than beauty:

    PHAEDRUS_OF_EMERSON

A le Carre characters joy at having stood up to torture:

    GRADUATE_OF_PAIN

Lead exposure => the violent crime epidemic

    LEAD_DOWN

The "Mundane SF Manifesto", hated by all including me:

    MUNDANE_MORNING

The degree of imitation allowed in popular art may be one of the
elements that evolves over time:

    UNSELECTIVE_SELECTS

A quote from Balzac about the collector's mania:

    SMALL_COINS

Brief history of the vampire trope:

    VAMPIRISM

A pointer to the greatest music video every made:

    GREATEST_MUSIC_VIDEO

A compare-and-contrast exercise, picking away at the appeal of
the aforementioned greatest video:

    MAGIC_FORMULA

Yet another greatest video, and extra on a VHS for the anime...

    HYPERDOLLS

True fans like even the bad examples of a form, which means
that the people who know most are the people who you can't trust:

    BAD_AND_TRUE



08/27/13

Sweeping the floors, scraping the barrels, clearing the decks,
and mixing those 'phors again...

    OVERSTOCK

Whittaker Chambers on Ayn Rand; complaint about the similarities of
fascism and communism:

    WHITTAKER

Why oppose "the mainstream":

    SWAMP

And artist's statement for a cellspace show: attitudes
toward Stuff in the modern world:

    STUFF

The editor of the "Thrift Score" zine, understands that it's
all just more consumerism:

    THRIFT_SCORE

Some pointers to discussions indicated that materialism may not
be quite what it seems:

    DEMATERIALIZE

Krugman quote: industries of the future have no lobbiests

    INDUSTRIES_OF_THE_FUTURE

Review of some amateur (?) porn manga, a syndrome of not quite
going all the way:

    DOUJINSHI_SEX

Quote from Tristram Shandy about perserverance and obstinacy:

    FUSED_CORE

The reclaimation of lost youth trope:

    DREAM_OF_RENEWAL

Some miscellanious critisms of Lessig's schemes to attack
corruption:

    LESSIG_CLARITY

About the poet Ron Silliman; recommended by Delany because of
their affinity?

    SILLIMAN

Ron Silliman on the...

    PROBLEM_OF_THE_LINE

Silliman comments on the pathetic hard core lefties of the 70s...

    LIFETIME_LEFT

Chomsky notes that provacateurs are not all from the government,
rival groups of lefties snipe at each other; an explanation of
post-structuralism:

    CHOMSKY_UNDERGROUND

Fleming's "Thunderball"; attitudes toward Health Food:

    THUNDERBALL

Lewontin disses Jacoby in the worst way possible, by (a) not
mentioning his name, (b) by appropriating the "public
intellectual" term for people Jacoby gives short-shrift to
(acadmeic scientists such as Gould):

    PUBLIC_SCIENTIST

"Boys Over Flowers", a forgive-thy-rapist story:

    FLOWER_FOOD

Yves Smith complains that capitalism and marxism are both
too *materialistic*:

    ATOMS_AND_YVES

Going for complexity, but just smudging the lines of character:

    SMUDGED

Credulity of war propaganda, etc:

    ORWELL_AT_WAR

Orwell: It often does matter who wins:

    WAR_MATTERS

Orwell: the brit upper class, stupid or evil?

    TWO_LEGS

Orwell: a wide range of people supported fascism:

    ORWELLS_CREW

Orwell: there is a body of netural fact that none challenges:

    NEUTRAL_RESIDUE

An old friend in high school and college (a "wild man" example):

    STAPLEGUN_WARRIOR

The gulf between summarizing and generalizing is not huge:

    GENERAL_SUMMARY


08/17/13

One of everyone's favorite topics, gunfire in Oakland:

    CLOSE_GUNSHOTS


08/18/13

A long block that's unlikely to be of much interest
to anyone, I have to say...

    Leading off with a pair about project leaders
    who clearly have their shields up, and can
    barely hear any criticism:  Faarborg, the Firefox
    designer and Wales, founder of wikipedia:

    HIGH_TABS
    RHINO_SKIN

And that leads into this long stretch, largely a collection
of every gripe and whine I have leftover from my stint as
a wikipedia volunteer:

    The various techniques someone can use to Own a wikipedia
    page, to defend territory:

    COMMONS_OWNED

    The ones who walk away from wikipedia:

    WALK_AWAY

    An odd quirk of wikipedia jargon: contributers
    are "editors" rather than, say, "writers":

    WIKI_JARGON

    Trying to tone down the propaganda in a page about
    a piece of war-blogger slang:

    FISKING

    An old piece of alt.gothic babble, travails of
    editing the Beat Generation page:

    BEAT_PATROL

    There's always an information assymetry between the
    people involved in a dispute and any moderator that
    might be called in-- a foul when the refs not looking
    can provoke a response that gets your opposition in
    trouble:

    DISTANT_GALLERY

    A book by Andrew Lih, "The Wikipedia Revolution":

    WIKI_REV

    A quote: borderline trolls are the wortst:

    BORDER_TROLL

    A claim: organizations veer from personal to impersonal and back again:

    PERSONAL_IMPERSONAL

    A Jason Scott talk "Mythapedia", a claim that wikipedia
    needs centralized authority:

    WIKI_CENTRAL

    My adventures with trying to make a dent in the wikipedia
    guideline about quote Weasel Words unquote spit, spit:

    POP_GOES_THE_WEASEL

    Two approaches, wikipedia an example of either:

    TRY_OR_TRY_NOT

    A stub: there's more than trolls out there now:

    BESTIARY

    Sometimes it takes me a while:

    LONG_WARMUP

    Link labels and title pages should match; link labels should be informative:

    BY_LINK_CHAIN

Another piece of alt.gothic babble, the Beats and feminism;
a general break with the recent past:

    BEAT_BREAK

Some speculation on ranking contributors by contact
with reality:

    REALITY_RANK

Again: the need for real ids on the web to get
anything to work:

    REAL_ID

Promising anonymity is problematic.  Can you deliver?

    THE_ANONYMOUS_LIE






08/03/13

Crockford's history of computers and Javascript:

    DINOSAUR_WARS

Javascript is a trademark-encumbered name, despite having
an open standard...

    ZOMBIESCRIPT

jwz on browser UI, the obvious point that there is no one correct UI:

    YOU_AND_I_DIFFER

Apple's design geniuses fail New Urbanism:

    ROUND_PENTAGON

Customization features are just to shut up the critics, if you
actually use them, don't expect much sympathy when they go wrong:

    CUSTOM_FIRE


07/25/13

welcome challenges: liking to do what you don't like

    DIFFICULT_LOVE

kids don't know why they need to know anything

    THINK_YOU_ARE




07/23/13

Downtown Oakland and Pacific Heights: under and over heated,
yet both can seem dead:

    GHOST_TOWNS

Krugman nods: so, the rich have 2nd homes in cool neigborhoods,
he doesn't see the problem:

    KRUGMANS_TURF

I switch hats as convienient, is my allegiance with the
programmers or the artists?

    THE_HAT_SWITCH




07/19/13

An old bit from 1993, promoted up to it's own page for
ease of linking.

    WORLDS_END




07/19/13

And now introducing a section on "contradictions"
(which could be the theme of every section...).

    CONTRADICTIONS
    CONTRA_DICTIONARY

I insist that fiction has an almost metaphysical signifcance,
and yet it's transparently full of pandering and cheap tricks:

    FICTION_PARADOX
    FICTIONAL_VALUES
    DRAMATIC_FICTION

I turn up my nose at hustling for fame, and yet
conceed the importance of marketing, the need for
influence to have effect:

    FAME

Kevin Kelly on the need to believe in the

    IMPOSSIBLE

Sartre on dialectic and the "unity of internal contradictions":

    CONTRADICTORY_DIALECT

On being inside and outside the moment:

    RIDING_DOUBLE

An old realization of mine, at this point, skill and training
need not interfere with spontaneous rule-breaking:

    THE_CRUDE_VIRTUOSO

Presuming it's possible and desireable (big ifs, both),
What might a merger of art and science look like?

    MELD

We rigorously separate "Science and Technology" and yet always
want to speak of them together:

    SCITECH

The "compare and contrast" assignment gives way...

    COMPARE_CONTRAST_DENY_UNIFY

Applying a standard metaphor:

    METHOD_OF_LIGHT




07/19/13

One of those things I say all the time that somehow never got
said here: the phrase "car accident" has a way of deflecting
responsiblity:

    INEVITABLE_ACCIDENTS




07/13/13

A pretentious, probably redundant squibb about the sketchy way
the pre-web world is covered by the web:

    LINKS_THROUGH_TIME

Bands I saw preform at SF conventions in NY &&
the humor of context violations:

    MUSIC_OF_EMPIRE

An interesting pedagogical trick (possibly unintentional),
providing an opportunity to step across a context barrier:

    LOGICAL_CROSS






07/07/13

Kim Stanley Robinson's "global warming" trilogy,
which I call the "40/50/60" series:

    GETTING_WARM

    TERRAFORM_TERRA

    NUCLEAR_DENIAL

    A_POLITICAL_SCIENCE

    WARM_ENEMIES

    SPOOKED

    ERASED_MARS

    RICE_AND_SALT

    FAILURE_FAIL

A climbing adventure at Stanford:

    OVER_THE_TOP

More recently, a minor bit of climbing on Caltrain:

    TRAIN_CLIMBING

There are rules and rules, and a case can be made for self-imposed ones:

    IDAHO_RULES

The 15th Century "Monkey King":

    MONKEY_TRICKS

06/09/13

Concerning Peter Kwong's
"The New Chinatown":                       I succeeded in resisting the
                                           title 'CHINATOWNS_JAKE'.  For now.

    THE_NEW_CHINATOWN

    CHINATOWN_REAL

    CODE_OF_SILENCE

    FLAME_OUT

    ARTSY_TOWN

    HIPSTER_GENTRY

    VOICE_OF_CHINA




05/18/13

Elements of fiction that "resonate" for reasons that aren't
always clear:

    MYSTERIOUS_RESONANCE




05/18/13

The Wildman figure:

    WILDMAN

    ON_BROKEN_WINEGLASSES




05/13/13

Peter Schwartz on scenario planning:

    ART_OF_THE_MULTIPLE_VIEW

    MULTI_LINKS




05/12/13

The interminable "Heel Sibilings" arc in the manga "Skip Beat:

    DOWN_AT_HEELS




05/03/13

Two kinds of humor, recognition and constrast, the expected and the surprising,
(split off from an existing node because it didn't really fit there):

    HARE_HARE_YUKAI




05/03/13

Bigger is not always better:

    BIG_BAD




05/01/13

Here, there be chickens.  And eggs.

    THINK_OF_CIRCLES




05/01/13

The existential hollowness of the modern world.
(What *did* the kids make of this at the double-feature,
anyway?):

    CARNIVAL_OF_LOST_SOULS




04/27/13

Some fragments read on the radio, another entry in the genre of
marketing satire:

    CONCEPTROID

04/27/13

Phil Och's "The Crucifixion", taken as an example of a piece of
art that trancends the obvious rules:

    CROSS_OF_OAK

04/27/13

A few things about climbing. Physical climbing:

    CLIMBING
    CLIMBING_HISTORY
    DOORWAYS
    HIGHWIRE
    TIGHTROPE


03/10/13


Off and on, I've spent the last month scribbling about things
related to the gun control issue... a lot of this is really
about public decision-making, getting stampeded by dramatic
events in the news, and so on:

    GUNS

    ZEN_OF_DEATH

    DRAMATICS

    COMPARATIVE_DEATH

    ADDRESS_THE_PROBLEM

    GUNS_AGAINST_CRIME

    ROBOT_CARS

    THE_DAVROS_PROJECT

    CITIZEN_EXPERT

    CIRCULAR_DRUM

    INVESTIGATIVE_ETHICS

    UNTHINKABLE

    DATA_GUN

    MOJO_GUN

    LATE_SHIFT

    THE_GREAT_CAR_THREAT

    MODERATE_STREAM

    THINKING_THROUGH_THE_UNTHINKABLE

    FINDING_VALUES

    SINGING_DRONES

    MOVIE_PLOT_THREATS

    MOVIE_STAR_THREATS

    PLAY_WORD

    SECOND_THOUGHTS

    FAVE_A

    GUNSHOT_BANDAIDS

    ASSAULT_ON_WEAPONS

    BOSS_PSYCHO

    STRONGMAN

    SCANNERS

    SHARPENING_TAXONS

    DISTANT_GUNSHOTS




02/03/13

Added:

    COAL_POWERED_CARS




01/24/13

Added:

    STANDING_TOOLS




01/23/13

Continuing to work over a single essay, Pauline Kael's "Trash,
Art and the Movies" from 1969, the closest thing to an overaching
manifesto that she ever wrote...

Kael was unable to decide if movie's are art (and didn't appear
to notice she had a problem with it):

    TRASHING_KAEL

The honest response of teens, the ignorant response of teens
(which is it?):

    HONEST_KALE

Perhaps the elder Kael was moving beyond her younger committment
to trash?

    GROWING_KAEL

Several incomprehensible remarks by Kael:

    PERPLEXING_KAEL

The ultimate transgression: other critics on Kael's turf...

    TRANS_KAEL

Bad art is not always harmless. Proof: Doris Day:

    AGAINST_THE_WALL_OF_DAY

(I did not name that one "KAEL_SERA_SERA" because I'm trying to be good.)

    THE_HUMAN_KAEL

Arguments--

    FROM_AUTHORITY

Further pondering on the possiblities of Alternate Kaels, purer
children without her contradictions:

    SEEDS_OF_KAEL

A quick outline of ways of proceeding with that method, creating
fictional critics based on actual ones:

    SEEDS_OF_SEEDS

A timeline of some critical publications:

    CRITICAL_TIME

Pauline Kael's somewhat bizzarre, hostile response to the film "2001":

    2001_KAELS


01/23/13

Another Roger Corman film, this time just Produced by him, and
directed by one of his "discoveries", Francis Ford Copolla:

    DEMENTIA13

01/23/13

Some thoughts upon the "origin story" common in the super-hero
comic book world:

    ORIGIN

01/03/13

Brief notes about the anime:

    COWBOY_BEBOP

Puzzling over the obvious reference/theft of, of all things,
the Mannix theme:

    THEME_RUSTLER


01/01/13

Paul MacIssac of WBAI, who used to argue the anti-promethian
position, that human beings can't handle great power:

    ANTI-PROMETHIAN




01/01/13

A plea for closure, or at least for conclusions:

    THE_ENDING_MANIFESTO
    THE_ENDING_RING




01/01/13

Charles Stross, Walt Whitman, and the future of literature:

    FUTURE_VISTAS
    JAGGED_WEB




12/31/12

Manga about manga:

    BAKUMAN

All genre eventually goes meta:

    META-GENRE




12/30/12

A James Blish novel celebrating cannibalism:

    JACK_OF_EAGLES

Sheet rock: bane or boon?

    NEATLY_SEALED

The summer of flies:

    OPEN_HOUSE

Theodore Sturgeon's inspiring and problematic:

    SKILLS_OF_XANADU

An idea in the air, in 1956, the:

    YEAR_OF_SYMBIOSIS




12/30/12

Stewart Brand's recent book, in favor of cities, nukes, and
genetic engineering:

    WHOLE_EARTH_DISCIPLINE

    REALITY_DEBASED




12/30/12

About the old "biter bit" story-form:

    BITER_BIT
    BITING_BEYOND

12/29/12

Concerning a very popular example of shoujo (young girl)
manga (and also anime), "Skip Beat":

    SKIP_BEAT

A common problem with series fiction, the writer has abundant
opportunities to show their

    HEADGROOVE

The fannish (critical?) compulsion to take-over for the writer;
and an interesting solution to the absence of closure in the
never-ending-series:

    IMAGINARY_FINISH

A brief primer for the anime "Sket Dance":

    SKET_DANCE



12/18/12

Some jamming about a pair of critics in opposition (but not
really): Dwight Macdonald and Pauline Kael

    PADS_AND_GARRETS
    DWIGHT_MAC
    AGAINST_THE_MIDDLE
    GREAT_BOOKS_MIDDLE_MIND
    DOWN_WITH_KAEL
    PLEASURE_POINT
    FORGET_PLAY
    KAEL_TECHNIQUE

    2001

    PERMANENT_GAP
    PEKART
    CHEESECAKE
    DOOM_COMIC

    GREAT_LEAP
    RESIGNATION
    LOST_CONTACT
    COMMON_RESPECT
    HEMINGWAY
    JUST_NOT_THE_FACTS
    MIDDLES_AND_MIDDLES
    MIDCULT

    DIEHARD

    AKB48

    FOLK

    CORMAN
    X-RAY_EYES
    UNDEAD
    WORLD_CONQUEST

    MELODRAMA

    CRITICAL_ABCS
    SHARDS_OF_THE_CRITIC
    C_SQUARED
    CRITICS_OF_THE_MIND




09/14/12

A number of things more-or-less related to George Scialabba's,
"What Are Intellectuals Good For?" (2009):

    SCIALABBA
    THE_NEW_INTELLECTUALS
    ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
    UTOPIAN_BERLIN
    WORLD_OF_HEROES
    SUBVERSIVE_PRAGMATIC
    MASS_DISAPPOINTMENT
    DIVIDED
    DRUM_BEAT
    DEATH_OF_HIP
    ANTI-ANTI-ELITISM-ELITISTS
    ELITE
    PROTO_ELITE
    SCIALABBAS_GOODS
    CITIZEN_SLACK
    ENCOUNTERING_SCIALABBA
    EXTRAORDINARY_COLLECTIVE_PUSILLANIMITY
    WHAT_SHOULD_WE_DO
    RINGING
    ALL_CONSUMING
    OTAKU_FED
    OTAKU_REBELS
    FEDERATION
    POLITICAL_AESTHETES
    CHOMSKY_UNLIT




07/13/12

Added:

    THE_REAL_PEOPLE
    VIRTUAL_TRAP
    UNIVERSE_MAKER
    DEGREES
    HUMAN_DIFF
    BLAME
    HUMAN_WEIGHT
    SCUMZOIDS




05/27/12

A now-classic rant with me, from a version I wrote down in 2009:

    CELLPHONES




05/27/12

The observation that cutting off communications can
suddenly increase radical behavior:

    OPIATE_MEDIA




05/26/12

The manga "My Girlfriend is a Geek", showing an Otaku in action:

    OTAKU_ACORNS




05/12/12

Hiroki Azuma's "Otaku: Japan's Database Animals" (2001),
sheds a little bit of light on the Otaku sub-culture,
and shows that wonky postmodern cultural commentary
did not die with the last century:

Your culture is a database, you are an animal:

    OTAKU_BASE

Azuma uses a very familiar human/animal distinction:

    OTAKU_ANIMAL

The slice of teenage otaku life (in a manner of speaking),
a defense of sorts for fantasies of pedophilia (as long as
they stay fantasies):

    LUCKY_STAR

                  (For no good reason, this wasn't
                  really added until 06/03/19)

A distressing revelation from "Lucky Star": the Japanese
"Otaku" is essentially just a kid that watches a lot of
broadcast television:

    LUCKY_MIRROR

The film "Kamikaze Girls", a blatant attempt at encouraging
consumerism:

    OTAKU_CONSUMED

A stub asking the question of what Azuma's utopian dream
might be, what if we went the other way:

    OTAKU_DENIED

Given the Hegelian human-animal distinction, should we
then embrace back-to-nature movements?

    OTAKU_WILD

The only choice, consumerism or snobbery?

    OTAKU_SNOBBED

Is all human contention "snobbery"?  A loaded term:

    HUMAN_CONTENTION

Mouthing phrases that sound Very Serious:

    VERY_SERIOUS

Pontificating about the state of nature:

    NATURAL_MISTAKE

So why is the "database" view better than thinking about
a network of influences?

    OTAKU_INFLUENCE

John Coltrane's "reservoir", the shared repository of music:

    BIG_RESERVOIR

Denying history so your thing can be the New Thing:

    OTAKU_AHISTORICAL

The history of the development of the Otaku subculture...

    OTAKU_HISTORICAL

Supposedly, the key term in Azuma's discourse is *moe*:
he uses it without explanation:

    OTAKU_KEY

The way I came to Azuma's book:

    OTAKU_WAY

The Japanese defeat in WWII (and what about the economic
lost decade, in the 90s?):

    OTAKU_DEFEATED

The iconic "Neon Genesis Evangelion" viewed different ways:

    EVANGELION

"Dusk Maiden of Amnesia":

    OTAKU_DUSK

They show a greater respect for the material
they work with... a result of a lack of individualism?

    OTAKU_RESPECT

An anime trope: the duplicate city built in a far future
time somewhere off in space:

    OTAKU_CITY

The drive to collect everything of a type can be defeated
by the sheer quantity that's available:

    OTAKU_SCOPE

The drive to make the invisible visible:

    OTAKU_BENTO

What modern era?  What grand narrative?

    OTAKU_MODERN

Two cultures that continually trade back-and-forth
imperfect images of the other:

    DISTORTING_MIRROR

A directory node of various otaku-related things I've covered:

    OTAKU_YAKI




05/12/12

On the subject of the "Macross" anime universe-- more stuff
originally written in 2010:

    MACROSS
    MACROSS_TRANSFORMS
    SEX_CROSSED
    DECULTURE
    MACROSS_THEME
    EVASIVE_MANEUVERS
    MACROSS_BACKWARDS

    CLASSIC_NAMES




05/05/12

A note about the Hakim Bey essay:

    IMMEDIATISM

(I see I have a bunch of stuff like this written around 2010
that I never bothered to push out because it seems a little
slight and pointless... )


05/03/12

Some notes about the Warren Beatty movie about John Reed
(which I started writing about in 2009...):

    REDS




05/02/12

Different experimental phases I went through when
working on my high school mystery novel:

    BRENNER_6

  o  A set of characters based on myself at
     different ages
  o  Limitations on the amount of notes I
     was allowed
  o  A system of diagramming human relationships.




04/25/12

When pervs are obsessed with the truly immoral,
not just symbolic transgression:

    ABSOLUTE_IMAGINATION

04/23/12

Imitation vs creativity:

    COSPLAY

04/17/12

Roquentin's resolve at the end of "Nausea", to write a story as...

    HARD_AS_STEEL

04/14/12

The triangular diagram of Sankaku Complex:
interactive/multimedia/monomedia,
really meaning manga/anime/games:

    SANKAKU

04/13/12

Deeper problems that aren't addressed by campaign finance reform:

    MURDERER_IN_CHIEF

03/31/12

The myriad ways nodes can be linked:

    INNER_TUBES
    POSEY_TUBE

03/31/12

Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn":

    BUILDINGS_LEARN

    BRANDED_EDGE

    PUNK_CITY

    BEEB_LEARNS

    NOMADICS

    BRAND_QUOTES

    REVIEWERS_LEARN

    RE_EVOLVE

    LEARNING_THE_BOARD




03/11/12

Larence Lessig, "Republic, Lost", and his scheme to
achieve public funding for elections via a constitutional
convention:

    LONG_SHOT

    KLEIN_MONEY

    FIXED_NATURE

    FREE_TV

    THE_LONG_WATCH

    WEAK_POINTS

    REPUBLICAN_LOST

    THE_BIG_KNOT

    ASSIGNMENT_IN_LIBERTARIA

    ROOT_BELOW

    CORRUPTED_REASONING

    RELIABLE_DISAPPOINTMENT




03/03/12

Problems with the "class war" line

    CLASS_WAR

Winning hands (when it's many hands against many dollars?):

    HANDS

The self-reinforcing knot of problems, the viscious circle:

    CHAIN_DRIVE




02/28/12

The Japan-US connection/barrier:

    A_DREAM_OF_JAPAN




02/28/12

A cluster concerning otaku-fodder (anime, manga, etc),
including soundtrack music.

The age old music-video problem:

    CORRUPTING_VISION

Translations between media, the first-encounter prejudice...

    SOUND_AGAINST_VISION

An encounter with anime soundtrack music divorced from the visuals:

    MIX7

Same-style, different spin, Japanese vs American:

    BLEACHED_SOUND

The "Drama CD" genre in Japan: the radio drama survives?

    DRAMAROLA

The "Fruits Basket" saga, first encountered by me in the most
obscure possible form:

    FRUITS_BASKET

The sense of "Walking Backwards", discovering things in a late-form
and working back to the origin:

    WALKING_BACKWARDS

Genres proceed by the slow recombination of tropes:

    TROPISM

The orphan as hero, to get freedom of movement.
The ways fiction often cheats.

    ORPHAN_ADVENTURES

Sartre's opposition of fiction to life, the tale-teller isn't living
the tale...

    SURROUNDED_BY_STORIES

On re-reading Sartre's

    NAUSEA


02/19/12

Sorry about the sudden burst of edits here... I've been
writing stuff steadily since my last release of stuff in
August 2011 but it's been languishing on my laptop,
awaiting a quiet afternoon for me to learn how to push
it out to it's new home at sonic.net (since I've moved
from Noe Valley to Oakland, it's no longer hosted on a
machine in my apartment via Mike Durkin's Rawbandwidth).

(Don't you hate zine editorials?
Endless excuses for why the issue is late.)

02/19/12

Djerassi's "Cantors Dilemma" (1989), a novel essentially
about science as a trust network (but with a lot stuff
about sex tossed in to keep the rubes awake):

    CANTORS_DILEMMA

Speculating about a resurgence of amateur science, via internet
enabled co-operation:

    AMATEUR_NET

Pondering the degree of subversion of wikipedia on varioius
different types of articles:

    WICKED_WORLD

Proceedures for conducting double-blind experiments with yourself
as the test subject:

    DOUBLE_BLIND_YOURSELF

Massive group art projects coordinated via internet:

    ARTWORK_NET

A graduate student's eye view of the cold fusion dramatics:

    FUSION_SPLIT


Some expanded material about a guy working the "wild man" schtick
(actually not added here until 05/08/19):

    WILD_DUDE


Speculating about the source of confusion surrounding "Cold
Fusion":

    COLD_FUSION

5-fold symmetry in crystals was a "scientific impossibility" until
it was discovered experimentally:

    QUASICRYSTALS

The classic geometric definition of crystals, produced by translational
symmetry of a minimal unit cell:

    CRYSTALLINE_DEFINITION

Dogmatism vs. Anti-Dogmatism:

    DOGMA

The vinyl/cd wars:

    COOL_WARMTH

Movies/videos often need to be tightened up, I think:

    HALF_SLOW

Speculations about sourees of error in the standard measurements
of the human range of hearing:

    RANGE_OF_HEARING

Personal experience with the mp3 format acting as a high-filter:

    SKULLFLOWER


02/09/12

Some stuff related to
"Proust was a
Neuroscientist" (2007)       I scored a nice crisp trade paperback
by Jonah Lehrer.             edition from 2008 for a buck in a thrift
                             store in New York, a nice find considering
                             I'd been meaning to read something by him.


    JONAHS_COOKIE
    BICAMERAL_CITY
    LOST_SCIENCE_OF_ART
    JONAHS_STRAVINSKY
    PLASTIC_JONAH
    JONAHS_WOLFE
    JONAHS_TECHNICAL
    BROCKMANS_THIRD
    JONAHS_WHITMAN
    SHOPPING_WALT
    JONAH_UMAMI


11/15/11

Post-crash, here in the "great recession" I've heard it said there's a...

    MARXIST_REVIVAL

The American Right is looking like the old Soviets (yeah, I know: yawn):

    THE_NEW_BOSS

What happens after the next wall comes down?

    AFTER_THE_WALL

Neither Marx nor Smith?  Some takes by Freeman Dyson and Kenneth McLeod:

    NEITHER

Jean-Paul bouncing around on Marxism in "In Search of a Method":

    POLAR_SARTRE

Once again, evaluating ideas based on what they do:

    FAIR_GAME

The necessity of experts: Paul Krugman vs. Yves Smith:

    EXPERTISE

The necessity of experts: Paul Goodman vs. the young
barbarians of the 60s:

    THE_PROFESSIONAL_GOODMAN

The phrase "Search for a Method"; networks and human networks:

    SEARCH_FOR_A_SEARCH

12/04/11

"The Last Ditch" by Saint-Pierre, a pamphlet in defense of
Sartre:

    LAST_DITCH

A note about Sartre "expressing sympathy" for anti-Israel terrorists:

    SYMPATHY_EXPRESS

A biographical note about Sartre's involvement in and break with
the French Communist party:

    RED_SARTRE

12/04/11

C.S. Peirce uses the word "habit" in an odd way to describe
almost anything that persists over time:

    THE_PEIRCE_HABIT

When C.S. Peirce talked of making ideas clear, he meant a clearing away:

    CLEAR_PEIRCE

(And remember, *you* have useless jargon, but *I*
have a rich language with subtle shades of meaning.)

12/04/11

Kadushin on social network theory (an academic subject dating
back to the late-60s at least, now being re-invented by
us ignorant hackers):

    SOCIAL_NET




12/04/11

A fellow picking on that easy target, Ayn Rand,
and displaying quite a bit of tribal bias in
the process:

    SNEERFEST




12/04/11

A John le Carre concept "walking back the cat",
using the enemy's actions to learn about them:

    WALKING_BACK




12/04/11

A 1950s historical novel, displaying a tendency toward
"prosaic explanations" that I suspect are just more myths:

    CYRUS_THE_GREAT

12/04/11

Cautiousness with complex systems and identifiable
political camps:

    MOTHER_COMPLEX


12/03/11

An autobiographical piece about moving out of our old apartment:

    LEAVING


12/01/11

Using dubious sources for unusual purposes:

    BAD_SEED


12/01/11

There's apparently some evidence that dead metaphor is not percieved as imagery:

    DEAD_METAPHOR


12/01/11

We need history when we don't have understanding:

    SLOW_JUNG


11/30/11

Trying to take "The Standalone Complex" seriously...
Complex, emergent phenomena in a networked world, apparently causeless:

    STANDALONE_COMPLEX


11/29/11

Examining one of the great issues of the day: subs vs dubs.

    SUBS




11/29/11

The movie "Brick", a pastiche that didn't suck:

    BRICK
    IMAGINARY_BRICK




11/29/11

Tim Flannery's "The Eternal Frontier"; effects of connectivity
on geological time scales:

    BRIDGES


11/29/11

Everything leaks, everything is flawed... Wikipedia, The New York Times:

    LEAKS


11/28/11

Does a software technology demand only average intelligence,
or extreme brillance?

    WITS_QUICK_AND_SLOW

Why not just try it?  What are you afraid of?

    CONTAMINATION

A brief, modest proposal, the creation of a "trained
thinker" discipline separate from any particular body
of knowledge:

    THOUGHT_EXPERT

I insist on real identities, but the point is to
guarantee "full disclosure", but how well would that
really work?

    FULL_DISCLOSURE




11/28/11

Daniel Domscheit-Berg, wikileaks-defector gives us the low down (with
low blows) on Julian Assange:

    INSIDE_WIKILEAKS

Daniel Domscheit-Berg gives us the pitch for his alternate to Wikileaks,
a new, more intelligently designed project which I suspect is doomed:

    OPENLEAKS

Some Daniel Domscheit-Berg quotes, in favor of openness in general:

    GLASNOST

A wikileaks criticism that I don't take as seriously as D, something
or other about how the staff at wikileaks has too much power/discretion:

    WINDING_THE_WATCHMEN

The crazy founder syndrome:

    FOUNDLING

My standard complaint about Creative Commons licenses: there are too
many of them (Allen Wrench Syndrome):

    CREATIVE_COMMONS




11/28/11

Playing with a new genre, "the DVD-R audio magazine" (the ultimate
"long play" record):

    LONG_SEGUE

Example of the kind of thinking I put into a "set" of audio files
in a DVD-R audio magazine:

    SONIC_WEAVE

The long chain of odd circumstances that led me to mess around with DVD-Rs:

    SOUND_CIRCUMSTANCE

My lack of an mp3 player gadget (still!), an example of the failings
of modern consumer culture, from my point of view:

    MISSING_BOX


11/14/11

The self as a node in a network:

    NODAL_SELF

Continuity vs growth:

    CHANGING_IDENTITY




08/21/11

The New York Times reports internet shills for hire:

    TEN_YEARS_PLUS




06/25/11

A directory: the low arts and the low critical apparatus
that's evolved around them:

    MAPPING_THE_LOWLANDS

Characters need distinguishing characteristics:

    FUNNY_HAT




06/22/11

Dreyfus & Kelly's remarkable silly "All Things Shining"
(not a new release, but major re-writes):

    ALL_THINGS_SHINING
    SHINING_WAFFLES

Added a bunch of pages:

    SHINING_MEANING
    SHINING_CENTER
    SHINING_ARMOR
    SHINING_CHAGRIN
    SHINING_MUSE
    SHINING_REFLECTION
    SHINING_FLASH
    SHINING_SPIKE
    SHINING_FASCISTS
    SHINING_EXISTENTIALISM
    SHINING_NIETZSCHE
    SHINING_SHOULD
    ETHICAL_MORAL

04/30/11

"Sucker Punch":

    AND_JUDY


04/30/11

To spot references to Hollywood product, you need to know about
Hollywood product... I don't, and yet I do:

    FLICKERING_TRACES




04/24/11

To study attitudes toward war, start with adventure fiction,
not Nietzsche:

    NIETZSCHE_WORKSHOP




04/24/11

Dreyfus & Kelly's remarkable silly "All Things Shining":

    ALL_THINGS_SHINING
    SHINING_WAFFLES

A genre of books arguing against "overthinking":

    UNDERTHINK

"Getting psyched": direct control of emotion by intellect?

    PSYCHED
    McGWIRE

An old thought, now broken out in a node of it's own, the
power of the...

    DOUBLE_THE_NEGATIVE

    AFFIRM_FEAR


04/24/11

Quote about the difficulty of "facing the light":

    LIGHT_CHALLENGE

04/19/11

Monbiot spots the internet shills:

    TEN_YEARS_LATER


03/26/11

Michael Specter's book "Denialism", a scientific fundamentalist
takes on modern irrationality:

    SPECTER_OF_DENIALISM




02/27/11

"The Melancoly of Haruhi Suzimiya", and the strange state of
anime in general:

    MELANCOLY
    KYONISM
    MELANCOLY_TRAP
    ADVENTURE
    LOLITA_MOE
    MELANCOLY_GIRLS
    NOUNIFICATION
    SHAMELESS_DEVOTION
    FUJOSHI
    AWARE_BUT_THERE
    GOTHPUNK
    HOST
    SHOJOS_DESCENT

02/20/11

Listening to novels while half-asleep:

    LIBRIVOX

"The Flaming Jewell" by Robert W. Chambers (1922)

    FLAMING_JEWEL

Kenneth Robeson, "The Fantastic Island" (1933):

    SAVAGE_HONEYCOMB


01/07/11

The linguist Lakeoff and the tarnished reputation of his "frames":

    GOLDLEAF_FRAME

The always problematic burden-of-proof:

    BOP


12/21/10

Some Addendum to THE_HERETIC.
about properly adding up the environmental
costs and benefits of a course of action:

    MITIGATE
    COAL_DEATHS




12/21/10

The book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway:

    MERCHANTS_OF_DOUBT


12/07/10

"The Beat Generation", and observation or an act of creation?

    BEAT_DROP




11/07/10

The key speech near the close of Gibson's "Neuromancer",
tear down the walls, change for change's sake, etc:

    TIGHTER

Buried underneath the stylish writing of "Neuromancer", a
romantic view of the soul:

    NEUROMANCER




11/07/10

The evolution of artificial organisms, "Darwin Among the
Machines" and Sturgeon's "Microcosmic God":

    MECHANIZED_DARWIN




11/07/10

The differences between cultures as a source of energy:

    POTENTIAL_DIFFERENCE




09/22/10

Boyard's take from '48, the symbolic rebellion of the...

    HIPSTER




08/29/10

Links to what I've said about "pragmatism", and a brief
rundown of it's problems and virtues:

    PRAGMATIC_REVIEW

A somewhat redundant repetition of the above, but with added
name-dropping (de Beauvoir/Sartre, Peirce):

    USEFUL

Peirce wielding irrational numbers as a club against Berkeley:

    RADICAL_MINUS

A primer on irrational numbers:

    I_SQUARE




08/15/10

"Naked Lunch" as an honest book, albeit a corrupting one:

    NAKED_LUNCH




08/14/10

A set of directory nodes:

    ONE
    TWO
    MANY




08/14/10

"Jesus Christ, Superstar" (why exactly? whatever):

    WESTERN_STAR




08/13/10

Talking about "The Left" in the third person:

    WHOS_LEFT




08/13/10

A cribbed summary of human cognitive biases:

    RISK_ASSESSMENT




08/12/10

"The Monkees" and other successes of calculated fabrication:

    PREFAB




08/11/10

The Sacher-Masoch novel, a success as a psychological novel
(unlike de Sade):

    VENUS_IN_FURS




08/11/10

Agile Software development, what can be salvaged?

    AGILE




08/10/10

Examples of 60s SF extrapolating to a fashion for nudity:

    TIMELESS_SKIN




08/10/10

The intellectual's contempt for fashion:

    RAPIDS




08/10/10

Making use of the biographies of the great:

    GREAT_EGO




08/10/10

The Sayer's novel, and the story as a vehicle for minutiae:

    NINE_TAYLORS




08/09/10

Some proposed exercises, concerning looking for wisdom in...

    UNLIKELY_PLACES
    DARK_CORNERS




08/07/10

Between large scale human organizations, and
individual life, there's another subject I don't
touch much... sometimes called "project management".

    SCALY_AXIS




08/07/10

Global warming media-manipulations:

    CRANIAL_COOLING

Summary of Freeman Dyson's critique of the climate science establishment:

    THE_HERETIC


There's a defense of "genetically modified" food, afoot:

    WHATS_GOOD_FOR_GM


08/07/10

Cartooning styles:

    BIG_HEAD

When opposites attract.  Or when pairs of them do,
but only at one end:

    PLAYING_ANGLES




08/06/10

Stefan Collini sneers at those *other* intellectuals who
keep writing about intellectuals:

    CALLING_COLLINI

Carefully attributing quotes-of-quotes in the clumsiest way
imaginable:

    DUTY_IS_SERVED

Charles Kadushin, who started in tracking intellectual elites
decades ago:

    KADUSHIN

Quoting an old critique of Kadushin's old rankings (why is
the editor of the NYRB so far up there?):

    HEIGH_YO




08/06/10

There is actually no reason for this to have been pushed out
into public view, except that I felt the need for it as something
to link to.  I already had some broken links looking for it,
so now it exists, though it's essentially redundant:

    POSNER_DECLINES




08/04/10

About "The Ghost in the Shell", in particular the "Stand Alone Complex
television series, with emphasis on interpreting the closing lyrics:

    LITHIUM_FLOWER




07/26/10

Charles S. Peirce was an admirable fellow, but does he still
speak to us?

    PEIRCE_THE_MAN

Going through an odd Peirce essay "Man's Glassy Essence":

    ESSENCE_OF_MAN




07/26/10

 A very simple addtiton to SPORTS_LOGIC
 (whose material I shuffled around a bit):

    ETERNAL_CONFLICT




07/24/10

More on the great language wars, perl against the world:

    CASE_STUDY_4




06/14/10

One of my favorite idiot savants:

    WARHOL

Making use of one's limitations:

    UNLIMITED

Begginings of a thought about using what you are
shouldn't mean dictating to everyone to be like
you.

    AFFINE_MESS




06/11/10

The Ramones: not strictly a celebration of stupidity:

    AND_NOT_DUMBER




06/11/10

A reminder about early reactions to Patti Smith:
they weren't all glowingly positive:

    SMITH_RETRO




06/11/10

The early stories of F. Scott F show a conviction that
our calendar age dictates our attitudes:

    YOUNG_FITZGERALD

Raising the question of whether you can overcome the
age bias:

    FRESH_EYE




06/11/10

Meditations on the original meanings of the word "punk":

    POWER_OF_PUNK

A collection of Lester Bangs quotes about punkishness:

    BANG_PUNK

Lester Bangs and his influence (not entirely positive):

    LESTER_BANGS






06/11/10

Punk history.  A short list of first record releases by punk bands:

    VINYL_PUNKS

The problem of "The Runaways":

    RUNAWAYS




06/11/10

Paul Morrisey's take on Warhol in the days of the Factory:

    FACTORY_DAYS




06/07/10

A policy note on avoiding mentioning the names of those that
don't deserve promotion:

    NAMELESS_ASSASSINS




06/07/10

Using conspiracy theories as a
generator of hypotheticals in a        I published this one by
program to use counter-factuals to     accident when I was reaching
prove the nature of history.  Or       for NAMELESS_ASSASSINS... but
something like that.                   why was there any rush about
                                       publishing that one?
                                                              Speaking of
    ASSASINATION_FILE                                         peculiar
                                                              esthetic
                                                              choices.
A comment on the philosophic premise of the film
"Hero":

    HERO




06/07/10

An introduction to things I hope you won't read:

    CRATED_DEPTH




06/05/10

Clipping a spiel from a mystery novel,
about melodrama vs. literature, where
rather than discuss the ideas I go off
on tangents...  including complaints
about the esthetic problems of the
esthetic terminology deployed:

    CORKER

About a common piece of schtick in genre detective fiction:

    YOU_AGAIN

Paul Morrissey on his movie "Flesh", and the peculiar set of esthetic
choices that underlie it:

    DRY_FLESH

A quote from Plato's Gorgias:

    STANDARDS_OF_BEAUTY

Some dubious musing on the motivations for creating art,
clipped from yet another mystery novel:

    GILDED_FLY




05/21/10

Starting a new (but not very) spiel about Nietzsche,
beginning with David B. Allison's book(s):

    NIETZSCHE

The old NIETZSCHE node has been renamed:  WORDS_WITH_WHIPS


05/19/10-05/21/10

A wise man criticizes that dreadful innovation, the typewriter:

    CHOPSTICKS_OF_THE_MIND

And here we have a long form and a short form of some quotes from
Well's "Outline" that I've always thought were fantastic, and I
can't believe I don't seem to have used them before.  (I would
guess I couldn't make up my mind to use the long form or the
short... there comes a time to take the poet's choice):

    INTELLECTUAL_MECHANISM

    A_DAY_WILL_COME

A relatively minor critique of the modern DVD player:

    MODCONS



05/18/10

On the design of policy for online discussion groups:
do you expect people to rise above insult, or do you
attempt to mandate politeness:

    BURDEN_OF_SKIN
    USENET

05/18/10

At long last, I weigh in on a teapot tempset about sexual humor
in a talk at a technical conference... (I fear there are
young geek women who haven't learned *why* the 70s feminists
became passé):

    POLAR_TRAP

First, the case (roughly) against the "feminist" side:

    CONTROLLING_THE_NARRATIVE

Second, the case (roughly) againt the Insensitive Males:

    BEHAVIORAL_CODE

An aside about Telulah Bankhead vs Lillian Hellman:

    BANKHEAD_AHEAD

I'm complaining about a group using broad generalities...
who am I talking about exactly?

    HIVE_VAGINA

The question of the absence of women in technical fields,
considered as a multiple-choice test:

    WOMAN_HUNT




04/21/10

Working over the wonky ideas of a resoundingly minor thinker:

    FIRE_IN_THE_BRIG




04/21/10

The scene at the always reliable:

    ANARCHIST_BOOK_FAIR

Kim Stanley Robinson on Science as a functional example of
utopian social organization:

    ANARCHIC_ROBINSON
    UTOPIAN_SCIENCE

Freeman Dyson on science as a conspiracy against ignorance:

    THE_SCIENCE_CONSPIRACY

About the Kim Stanley Robinson novel "Anatarctica":

    FIRE_DOWN_BELOW

The "Advanced Free Wanderers":

    FREE_WANDERERS

A bit from the KSR novel Antarctica that seems like it has wider
application:

    THE_SOCIAL_CONTRACT

KSR, what "conservation of energy"?

    THERMAL_DREAMING

The direction of time emerging out of complexity:

    SEA_OF_TIME

A quip about the uh, glacial, progress of science:

    BLUE_SPARKS




03/01/10

With the video age, we can all see what bad witnesses we are...

    MEMORY




02/20/10

Tastes in solitary games:

    SOLITARE

02/20/10

Freeman Dyson's recent writings about Dirac -- mathematical
elegance as truth and philosophical agnotiscism about quantum
mechanics:

    DIRAC_TRUTH


02/19/10

A simple, playable form of 3D tic-tac-toe:

    3D_TIC

Extending that to 4 dimensions:

    SLICING_THE_CUBE


02/19/10

James Blish's "The Quincunx of Time" aka "Beep".
Psychological reactions to pre-destination.

    QUINCUNX


02/19/10

"Existentialism", the possibility, perhaps the necessity of
making choices that transform the self:

    EXISTENTIAL

Freedom as something experienced, not a condition that can
be proved or disproved:

    FREEWILL




02/17/10

Murray Gell-man's take on "elegance", essentially another name
for familiarity:

    ELEGANCE

02/16/10

Some cases where being able to think two (apparently)
contradictory things is an perhaps an advantage:

    DOUBLE_THINK




02/14/10

Carefully going through one of Posner's attacks on Krugman,
Posner abuses the difficulty of tracing references:

    DYNAMIC_PRICING_SLIPPERY_CUSTOMERS

Against amazon.com:

    THE_LONE_TIT

Arguably, on-line booksellers, better than big boxes?

    BIG_BOXES_OR_NONE

Filing away a Posner dig at some Krugman economic predictions
from 1990 or so.  I haven't checked the original yet myself.

    KRUGMAN_PREDICTS

02/07/10

Orwell on the decline of morality evidenced in crime fiction.

    ORWELLS_MURDER

02/07/10

About Chesterton's criticism of the pragmatists:

    ABSOLUTISTS_COCOANUT

02/07/10

Menand's discussion of Charles S. Peirce displays a lack
of sympathy, and perhaps of understanding:

    MENAND_PIERCED




02/06/10

Dissing a silly TV show (yawn):

    HOWROTCOD

Flashlights into the unknown.

    TACTICAL_LOGIC

An insight into a pattern: the sequel to
space fiction often becomes...

    EARTHBOUND




02/06/10

Moved an old bit here elsewhere... a theory about later text
books in a subject invariably being worse:

    TEXTS_IN_DECLINE

Another response to "Last Intellectuals", an object about
academia being in decline:

    ACADEMIC_LIGHTS

Those Last Intellectuals pirouette and milk their endless...

    DEATH_SCENES

Once again, instead of worrying about an intellectual's precise
beliefs, it's better to sketch out the field of possible beliefs:

    IN_SUM

Cartoon versions of the great "The Last Intellectuals" debate:

    THERE_IS_A_WAR

On the available components of social mechanisms:

    ROUGH_HEWN

Back to the need for a better web:

    BACK_TO_CENTER

Stock of "rising stupidity" is low:

    RISING_QUESTION


The genre of (Biased) Intellectual History:

    GRINDING_HEADS

On Menand's "The Metaphysical Club":

    MENAND_CLUBBED

Susan Haack against Menand's "vulgar Rortyism":

    MENAND_HAACKED

Cosma Shalizi cheapshot against Rorty:

    RORTY

Problematic intellectuals, in particular Richard Posner:

    TRAITORS_OF_INTELLECT
    DECOY

The stupid-crazy-evil triangle:

    DEGENERATE_TRIANGLE

Speculating on ways of measuring an intellectuals influence:

    SHADE_CAST

Posner and Dershowitz: just a coincidence?

    LONG_NOSED_BEAGLES

Posner, Gould and Murrays' "Bell Curve"

    IS_POT_BLACKNESS_HEREDITARY

Defending Krugman from Posner's unfounded accusation that he
indulges in unfounded accusations... among other things.

    KRUGMAN_INCLINED

The Dvorak myth (or myth-myth?) and Krugman's use of the QWERTY example...

    PEDDLING_PROPERITY

The Dvorak question... needs more research, I think:

    KEY_ISSUE

Posner whaffles on torture:

    TICKING_TIME_BOMBS

The idiotic ticking-time-bomb scenario:

    24_TEARS

01/24/10

Giving up on "The New York Times":
    TIMED_OUT

Andrew Cockburn's complaints about the forgotten enablers of the Iraq war:

    COCKBURN_TIMES_OUT

The New York Times doing blatant rah, rah reporting on the war in
Iraq, from a front page in 2003:

    DOING_THE_LIBERAL_RAG

An example of some weird pro-Bush headline spin from the print
edition (and only the print edition) of the Times:

    FROM_BOTH_SIDES_NOW

A front page NYT times story, remarkable because it wasn't:

    SMALL_TIMES

What is so absurd about the idea that the NYT is a...

    CIA_FRONT




01/08/10

Guru Lew and the Four Maniacs!  (Note: not a rock band):

    FONGHOOISM




11/06/09

Keeping your spirits up in the face of a blunder:

    ANIMA_SPIRITA

Platitudes, over-digested ideas, which aren't necessarily wrong:

    PLATYPUS

The daring hero vs. the dread necessity to plan:

    SCIENCE_OF_LUCK

Merlin Mann's advice on "creative" work, very limited, and domain specific:

    UNBLOCK

Dale Carnegie, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" (1936)

    CARNEGIE

Beth Lisick, "Helping me Help Myself"

    FREAKING_HELP

Two styles of Being Superior:

    SUPERIOR_MAN

Sensible beliefs and sensible actions are often disconnected:

    THOUGHT_ACTION_DISCONNECT

In praise of *some* Christians:

    ON_THE_WALL

The secular humanist paranoia about Christians:

    CHRISTIAN_ZOMBIE_VAMPIRES

The people who voted for Bush in 2004 didn't know what they were voting for:

    DIVERGENT_WORLDLINE

Hornblower/Forrester the saint of poor self-esteem:

    HORNBLOWER

Responsibility and "madness":

    REALLY_MAD

Dawkins on the built-in urge to help others, vs. the need to avoid
getting taken by human parasites:

    LUST_FOR_ALTRUISM

Christians "walking the walk", and trying to deal with the dregs
of humanity (a side note about a skate bowl as a brilliant
"anchor" to revitalize a park):

    CROSS_WALK

Aaron Cometbus, the Telegraph Avenue scene, and a display of punk
whineyness:

    DARK_COMET

The state of SF's "Day of the Dead", some problems with the idea
of ethnic authenticity:

    MUERTOS

Reactions to SF's Chinatown, once again problems with "ethnic authenticity":

    CHINATOWN




08/07/09

Steve Yegge vs Larry Wall vs those Other Languages:

    BLADES_OF_PERL




06/17/09

A write up of my reaction to reading Lao Tzu as a teenager:

    LAOTZU




06/17/09

On Dadaism:

    ---------------




04/13/09

The New York Times did a grossly incompetent job of covering the
2003 blackout in New York:

    TIMES_AGAINST_DARKNESS




04/2-3/09

Scavenging some pieces begun long ago and left lying around...


A tiny little bit, a reminder to myself
to make use of my core conceit:

    ZERO

An overview of book and movie versions of "Absolute Beginners":

    ABSOLUTE_BEGINNERS

James Blish, author and critic of science fiction:

    BLISH

Puzzling over a "New Pornographers" song:

    TWIN_CINEMAS




04/02/09

Continuing my blundering around through the history of genre fiction:
reading an E. Phillips Oppenheim novel:

    THE_ZEPPELINS_PASSENGER

A bit about the embrace of expansionism (from the above novel):

    LEBENSHRAUM

A guess about the Meaning of WWI (that it has none):

    FIRST_STAB




03/24/09

Some quotations from Goethe's "Theory of Color":

    IN_CONTRAST




03/22/09

A (facetious?) suggestion about putting over a philosophy of programming
with a forced athletic analogy:

    BIATHLON




03/22/09

Failures of nerve in the web game

    NERVE

But then, the software world has seen some cases of excessive ambition...

    XANADU

An expanded  discussion of one of Wikipedia's failure of nerve:

    NOFOLLOW




03/21/09

About fiction vs. non-fiction:

    NON




03/21/09

A long series about "masculinity", going over some claims
about the virtues of fictional violence, some discussion of
violent behavior among school children, and so on...

    MASCULINE_AMERICAN_MAN

    VIDEO_CHILDREN

    HULK_JONES

    SCHOOL_OF_PAIN

    RACE_DOWN

    VIOLENT_DREAMS

    DOMINANT_WHINING

    IRON-MAN

    STICKY_BLADE

    MEN_AT_WORK

    MEN_OF_THE_WEST

    MALE_ENERGY

    FAILED_MISSION

    HUMAN_DUPES

    BAD_SMELL

    THE_NEW_FLESH

    BEYOND_REST

    BEYOND_REASON

    THE_PLASTIC_FALLACY

    INTROSPECTION

    TATS_FOR_TITS

    BAD_TASTE





03/20/09

Re-wrote and expanded:

   WRONG_BATTERIES


03/07/09

Bohemia in life and art...

    WHATNOT
    SEEKING    as in, "Desperately--"


A few fan write-ups:

 The one and (one hopes?) only Bill Weinberg:

    WEINBERG

 Dan/Dani/L.E. Leone:

    THE_JAWS_OF_THE_LEONE



02/18/09

A first brush with the Greil Marcus book "Lipstick Traces" all about
the punk-dada connection, and perhaps one of the stupidiest works
ever generated by the pomo-eighties:

    CHALKBOARD_TRACES

Jamming about the game of tracing influences, thinking broadly about
patterns in cultural change (e.g. cycles between apollo/dionysisus):

    FLUENCE

John Cage's take on the purpose of music "To sober and quiet the mind"

    QUIET

The evolutionary character of art may explain the mystery of "the muses"
speaking through the mediocre:

    DIVINE_INFLUENCES

Fashion of the 1910s and 1920s, a rejection of decoration
that starts as asceticism and turns into elegance:

    SACKS




02/16/09


Tensions between activists and artists (with John Reed's musings
as an example):

    ACT_VS_ART

A very small point about hipster neoteny:

    LIKE_CHILD_MAN

A very inadequate piece about the moments when you know
you've crossed over into the underground:

    BOHO_MOMENTS

The downtown could move uptown more easily once upon a time:

    A_TRAIN

Discussing the poetry of the Moderns of the Greenwich VIllage of the 1910s:

    BLANK_VERSE

About Edna St. Vincent Millay ("Renascene", etc):

    MALAISE

Who she was sleeping with (and people's attitudes toward it)...

    MELEE


02/11/09

Revised:

   FALSE_CENTER
   PUNK


01/27/09

Some quotes by and about Duchamp:
  (a) irony = "chance at another vista"
  (b) artistic sensibility vs "the memory boys" in chess:

    DUCHAMP

Duchamp: art != truth; onlooker as important as artist:

    STUCK_ON_ART


01/22/09

A review of a quick, cheap production of a Modesty Blaise movie
(produced so the Tarrention empire wouldn't lose its option),
that works well, presumably because it was quick and cheap:

    MY_NAME_IS_MODESTY


01/20/09

You can't define "hipster" without using a negative definition.

    POSITIVELY_HIP

A quote, defining the bohemian, circa 1960:

    BOHEMIAN

What are we after?  (Some answers):

    SEARCH_PATTERN

The scene at The Samovar in Greenwich Village, 1910s:

    DUSTY_MYSTERY

On atmosphere (1917, Anna Alice Chapin):

    HAZE

Chapin in 1917, writing about the Greenwich Village love of play-acting
(aka posing):

    ACT_ONE

A review, a broad outline of Greenwich Village transformations:

    IMPROPER_BOHEMIANS

The war on Labor, in 1913, New Jersey:

    WAR_IN_PATERSON

Our freak predecessors at play, in 1917:

    GREENWICH_SECEDES

Attitudes toward collective madness: duck the inevitable, or fight to the end:

    MAD_WORLD

I theorize Reed's experience with WWI propaganda primed him to
reject later stories as "just propaganda":

    PROPAGANDA_AND_EXPECTATIONS

Emma Goldman giving up on the Russian Revolution (so what was Reed's excuse?):

    LONG_CHERISHED_DREAM

Reed cautions about "an astounding jumble of rumours":

    FOG

12/11/08

The emdash: your key to sloppy, spontaneous writing

    EMDASH




10/19/08

Chesterton quotes, touching on authenticity:

    REAL_MEN

The people who claim to be...

    CONSCIOUS

Small survey of me abusing a metaphor:

    SLEEPWALKERS_LIBRARY





10/18/08

A number of things related to
"Men of Tomorrow" (2004) by Gerard Jones

"Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book":

    MEN_OF_TOMORROW

A quote about some of the strange interplay of idealism
and business:

    SMALL_WONDER

On dealing with people, and cutting deals:

    COMICAL_DEAL

The Frank R. Paul cover of the August 1928 issue of _Amazing Stories_:

    AMAZING_AUGUST_1928

Siegel-Shuster, Superman and...

    ACT_OF_CREATION

Stan Lee vs. Jack Kirby, who was...

    THE_SOURCE

The jokey quality to Siegel's thinking:

    SUPER_CAMP

Independant convergence on men in...

    TIGHTS

The symbolic significance of nudity in pre-WWII America:

    BAREMINDED

Coy nudity interjected in the Skylark:

    EMERALD_LAND

The master of turn-of-the-century "Physical Culture":

    MCFADDEN

Gernsback, master of radio, visionary of television:

    GERNSBACK

The shady details of distribution, and some odd connections to
The Underground:

    DISTRIBUTION

Some nit-picking (?) about "Men of Tomorrow":

    NITS_OF_TOMORROW

Hearst used the narcotics craze to kill the hemp industy, or so
is claimed by Mike Gray (aka the author of "The China Syndrome" script):

    DRUG_CRAZY

Another case where Gerard Jones passes on a neat story with
dubious sources:

    FOUND_DEAD

Jones also shows a not unusual tendency to oversimplify
predecessors in preference to his main subject;

    KEY_FIGURES_BIT_PLAYERS


10/17/08

Getting the "proportions" right in political criticism,
describing a crime accurately without hitting the "crazy
extremist" filter is a tricky business:

    PROPORTION


10/16/08

The way is hard... therefore it can't be right?

    WAY

A name for a self-constricting process:

    MONKEYTRAPS

The scientist as drunk holding a lamppost:

    LAMPPOST




10/15/08

Some classic purple prose from Alan Moore:

    ON_HUMAN_BONES

Moore's "Miracleman" (aka "Marvel Man") and the songs that sing
you to sleep:

    SLEEPERS_WAKE



07/22/08

Moving some material from FAITH_CYCLE to it's own page:

    ACCESS_RAMP




07/21/08

Some material spun off from a recent discussion on alt.gothic,
with some additional material about creativity in the realm
of comic books (including some material about the Wylie novel
Gladiator, from memory -- but confirmed via web searches):


    MAKING_WRITERS

    CULTURAL_SCRAPS

    GLADIATOR




07/02/08

Talking about G.K. Chesterson's "Father Brown" stories again,
with emphasis on their Christian propaganda aspects:

    MATERIAL_WORLD

    NATURAL_THING

    ONE_TRUTH

    HUMBLED_AGAIN




07/02/08

Tales of force vs. tales of intelligence:

    UNDERPOWERED




07/02/08

Out of the phone booth, endlessly oscillating:

    PHONE_BOOTH

The deceptive character motif, what kind of deceptions?

    DECEPTIVE_CHARACTERS

John Drake vs. Smiley, the too-perfect hero considered as a flaw:

    DUCKING_DRAKE

Given two elements, alternation is the simplest structure:

    MODULATED_VOICE




06/22/08

Another one in a series arguing against a thought that
few want to express out loud:  we are not involved in
a war against Islam.

    NO_CRUSADES



A summary of Delany's tale about hob-nobbing with Umberto Eco.
About (against?) "networking":

    UMBERTO_NET

(This was published before, I'm just extracting it into
it's own page for easy of linking.)



06/18/08

High-brow art:

    UNRELIABLE_PRODUCT

"Make every song your favorite song":

    JAGGED_PHILOSOPHY




06/18/08

A bunch of old minor things I wrote some time ago, and actually
had links to, but never got around to publishing.  On occasion,
I do check my error logs, though...

People care about having the latest gadgets, but don't
appear to care what they are:

    DEATH_OF_HIFI

Burning Man vs. The Long Now:

    LONG_AND_SHORT

Beth Lisick's "Everybody into the Pool" (originally
part of NAUGHT_SEVEN):

    BETH_LISICK

The Bookchin/Foreman debate, where "opposing" sides met politely:

    RADICAL_FREEZE

A note about smurph:

    SMURPH


06/18/08

A craze in the 1920s amongst the elite:

    GIMMICK_PARTIES


06/18/08, 06/22/08

About the faith of Father Brown, and G.K. Chesterton,
and his continuous delicate and yet heavy-handed
assaults on those without the faith:

    CALUMNY

    CLATTER

    THE_BLUE_CROSS

    FLYING_STARS

    GOD_OF_GONGS

    FUNDAMENT

    UNLEASHING_DEMONS

Digging into a Chestertonian who appears to think
it's a sensible idea to get back to "common sense"
by all converting to Catholicism:

    COMMON_ART_OF_LOST_SENSE

Reactions to Holmes,  Chesterton's Brown and beyond:

    FOOTNOTES_TO_HOLMES

An incomplete page, with some possibly odd links:
"Offering *practical* reasons to support religious
belief would seem to indicate that you have
none..."

    RELIGIOUS_ORDER





06/10/08

Dave Egger's "826 Valencia" store, a fine example of the high-and-low strategy:

    WAY_OF_THE_PIRATE




06/06/08

A suspicion that the meaning of "Beat" evolved amongst the "Beat Generation"
fairly rapidly:

    EVOLVING_BEAT




06/06/08

An old note explaining the joys of night clubs to a neo-goth:

    CLUBBED




06/06/08

Out-of-control hipsters keeping it under control,
while the straights on the street are losing it:

    PAN_DOMESTICATED

06/06/08

Write first, read later.  Maybe:

    SHOOT_FIRST

Taking your time helps keep you from being trendy:

    DELAYED_RESPONSE

Does it matter if "it's been done"?

    DONE_BEFORE

An old "hero" accumulates some criticism from me:

    SHALIZI

Since we can't know the future, we can't speak about the future?

    NO_FUTURE




06/06/08

The mixture of metaphor and meaning:

    MIXMASTER

Death to the car metaphor:

    CHAIN_LUBE

Other possibilities:

    HARD_HEAD

Strange dream about dealing with maniacal passion from another:

    FOUR_HEARTS

Simile, metaphor, analogy...

    SIMILARLY

UI design obsessed with metaphor, for a time:

    THE_COMPARATIVE_RELIGION

Comparing fields, importing ideas from one to another:

    ODIOUS

Jane Jacobs, using organisms breathing as an example of a feedback system,
and comparing that to the way national currencies work:

    CENTRAL_CONTROL

05/30/08

Traces left of a re-write in a Shadow novel:

    MEANINGFUL_SPLOTCH

"The Embassy Murders" leading up to a classic surreal image:

    THE_HIDEOUS_DWARF




05/30/08

"We are alike you and I":

    LIKE_EVIL

The Thackery "novel without a hero":

    VANITY_FAIR

    VILLAINOUS_MASK

    ATTRACTION-REPULSION

    SYMPATHY

    UNIVERSAL_GOTH

"Below Suspicion", a John Dickson Carr novel that shows some unusual sympathy...

    SUSPECT_BELOW

"The Skylark of Space" by E.E.Smith.  Gimme that old time space opera...
 except that upon re-reading, it strikes me that there's a central
 theme about being able to trust the good guys to be good, while the bad
 guys always must worry:

    SKYLARK

 And here in that "old time space opera", I find buried a bit of political
 commentary about US steel:

    SOULLESS_CORPORATION

 And an objection to the way the "free market" messes with the cost of platinum:

    FREE_MARKET_EFFICIENCY

 The Skylark, a story self-conscious about the fact that it's a story?

    SELFCONSCIOUS_LIT




05/25/08

Speculations on the source of the pulp idea that The Orient
is the source of mystical knowledge.  (Maybe Roerich?)

    ORIENTED

Nicolas Roerich, artist, peace activist, mystic -- genius or con-artist?

    ROERICH

How *did* Kerouac get into Buddhism?  At a guess, the Shadow pointed eastward.

    ZEN_FLESH

About the (unfortunately) minor critic S.T. Joshi, the sort of
intellect the low arts must unfortunately often make-do with:

    JUST_JOSHI




05/24/08

A few Walt Whitman lines:

    SUBTLE_FUSION




05/20/08

The strange appeal of dictators, in this case the "Great" Napoleon:

    BONY_DREAD

05/20/08

Samuel R. Delany's "Triton", aka "Trouble on Triton":

    TRITON




05/20/08

The modern sensibility:

    CLEAN_AND_BRIGHT




05/20/08

The homey, familiar appeals of:

    HUMAN_ERROR

(On TMI and nuclear safety).


05/16/08

The "Bright Gray" Mr. Inbetween identity:

    INBETWEEN




05/15/08

Occam's Razor and Conspiracy:

    RAZING_CONSPIRACY

And extraordinary proof:

    EXTRAORDINARY_CLAIMS




05/15/08

"Highland Hawk" by Leslie Turner White.

    HIGHLAND_HAWK




05/15/08

Rafael Sabatini - "Captain Blood" (1922):

    CAPTAIN_BLOOD




05/15/08

The editor's slushpile, and the phenomena of everyone having the
same "clever" idea at once:

    SLUSH

An act of genius from a non-genius:

    THE_CASE_OF_HOLMES

The deservedly forgotten, but once successful:

    LESLIE_FORD




05/15/08

The metaphoric "wild card":

    WILD_CARD


05/11/08

A big cluster of nodes related to
Nassim Nicolas Taleb and his book
"The Black Swan":

    BLACK_SWAN
    WIDE_FIELD
    WHY_TELL_YOU
    SAN_FRANCISCO_DREAMING
    WHICH_WAY
    TOY_WORLDS
    KNOWN_QUANTITIES
    WILD_LOTTERY
    FALSE_KARL
    SCALING_SIMILARITY
    DARK_BALZAC
    RELUCTANT_STORYTELLER
    NARRATIVE_DRIVE
    PLATONIC_HATE
    THE_SWAN_SLEEPS
    ARROW_OF_DEMOCRACY
    TRAIN_RUNNER
    DUALISM_TRAP
    EXTREME_TRIGGER
    DANGEROUS_IDEAS
    PRIMITIVE_BIOLOGY
    IN_DEFENSE_OF_NERDS
    LOOSE_FEATHERS
    JUST_DO_IT_JUST_SO
    TALEB
    TALEB_DECK
    HATE_THE_MAN


03/21/08

Ways to indicate imprecision:

    FUND_OF_HEDGES

03/21/08

Darenzia, selling out, losing her edges:

    DEPRESSING_CURVE

The phenomena of "selling-out":

    GOING_DISCO

The problem of re-branding on the web:

    THIN_VENEER

01/24/08

"Burning Man" wakes a sleeper:

    LAST_THE_NIGHT




12/11/07

Obscure joke suggesting a contradiction in Chomsky's ideas about
linguistics and his political attitudes:

    QUESTION_FOR_CHOMSKY

Chomsky, the level-headed extremist:

    CHOMSKY_DONT_ROCK

A virtue of hypocrisy:

    WHEN_HYPOCRISY_DIES

Psychological-types and associated philosophies:

    PSYCHSOPHY

The craving for adventure and action:

    ELAN_VITAL

The "many truths" canardoid:

    SHOTGUN_TRUTH

Bertrand Russel's objections to pragmatism:

    RUSSELLS_BREAKFAST
    PRACTICAL_LIMITS


12/10/07

How to live without principle?  (Are there principles for doing that?)
Long term vs short term concerns, the instability of merely provisional
alliances, a need for over-arching shared goals.

    UN_PRINCIPLES

Starting again:

    CRAWLING_CROSS_THE_PLANETS_FACE

Uncritical adoption of an intellectual vocabulary:
  (1) "method",  (2) "orientalism"

    METHODICAL_BLUNDERS

First impressions of Edward Said's book "Orientalism": generally it has
a bad odor of pompous, pomo nonsense, but one does not want to be led
astray by it's rabid conservative critics, either:

    ORIENTALISM

We use a more complicated model of the world that just
east vs. west, right?

    TAXONOMY_OF_PLACE

The fear that close observation can negatively effect the thing observed:

    GUILTY_EYE




12/10/07

Low-grade racial drama on the 22 Fillmore bus:

    22_FILLMORE

San Francisco's Fillmore district, the comforting charms of
inauthenticity:

    FILLMORE_GOES_SOUTH




11/24/07

A quote from Sabatini's "Captain Blood" (1922) making an
obvious point about wrongful imprisonment:

    TREASON_FACTORY




11/23/07

The old Silver Bullet cliche:

    SILVER_BULLET




11/23/07

The utopia = boring meme, suspect?  Variants of the idea of the ideal:

    UTOPIAN_BLOCK




11/21/07

Giving Arne Naess' "Deep Ecology" manifesto the once-over:

    DEEP_ECOLOGY

Principles supported by:

    CONSEQUENCES

A long one, using "deep ecology" as an example of a doctrine that
is wrong in some sense, and yet often gets the right answers,
which calls into question what I mean by "wrong":

    EMPIRICAL_MORALITY

Gary Snyder's notion of...

    WILD_MIND

Humans and animals and a wildness possessed by language that is...

    BEYOND_WILD

The radicals fondness for extremes:

    REBEL_YELL

The bland, dull necessity of "moderation", and the possiblity of
further refinement:

    OTHER_HAND

Should "the developing world" be fenced-off to prevent development?

    FENCED_OFF

(( TODO associate with prime directive ))

Against the idea of "one world power":

    PAX_AMERICANA_NIGHTMARE

(( TODO associate with dyson etc  defense dominated world ))

Imperialism thrives on the idea of the sub-human:

    HUMAN_FEEDBACK

The oddly personal evaluation of thinkers independant of whether
you agree:

    WHAT_ARE_THEY_TO_ME

Dave Foreman and Linda Davidoff play out the old debate about
working inside or outside the system:

    SYSTEMS_INSIDE_OUT

Murray Bookchin's vision of "green cities":

    UTOPIAN_GREEN

Philosophy hater's and the necessity of philosophy:

    LOATHING_PHILOS

A favorite Bertrand Russell quote about the need to withhold
judgement in the absence of evidence:

    A_FAMILIAR_DOOM


11/07/07

Simple stories often work very well (despite myself, despite
what we're told):

    SIMPLEX

An almost certainly bogus understanding of "the death of the pulps":

    PULPY_DEATH

The batteries that adventure fiction recharges are apparently not
installed in everyone:

    WRONG_BATTERIES

(( note includes a remark about John Drake being too good: redundant? ))

A strange cultural hub in 1950s New York:

    HORACE_GOLD

11/05/07

A round up of criticism and counter-criticism of "Burning Man":

    BURNING_CRITICISM
    BURNING_DEFENSE
    BURNING_CRITICS

The demand for perfection, plus inevitable loop holes:

    ABSURDLY_PERFECT

Volunteer organizations develop defenses to any criticism:

    SHIELDS_UP

Trying to do an intelligent job of questioning Burning Man:

    AIM_AND_FIRE

Ravers want funding for their "sound art", I want to see them get
it past some

    MUSICAL_CURATORS

Anarchy zones for people with a sense of responsibility:

    FOCUSING_THE_GREY_LENS

The extreme response of many first timers at Burning Man:

    FIRST_THROUGH_THE_FIRE

Become a BM outfitter?

    EVIL_THOUGHT_NUMBER_23487

Some high-flown rhetoric is taken more seriously:

    HIGH_BAR_LOW_EXPECTATIONS

A related subject, the accusation of self-destructive behavior
("circular firing squad") to counter any internal criticism:

    CIRCULAR_FILE
    CIRCULAR_FIRING_SQUAD

Mediations on how the "thinkable" reflects what ever it is your
friends are doing just now:

    MOVING_TARGET

Frequent repetition cheapens an argument, and then puts it over
(after it's too late)?

    ARGUMENT_FROM_BOREDOM

11/05/07

Don't mind me, just free associating.

    NECRO


10/16/07

About Anne Radcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho" (1794):

    VILLAINY
    DRIP_DRIP_DRIP
    GHOSTWATCH

Maxwell Grant nods:

    GRANTS_TOMB


09/12/07

I got the feeling some friends of mine needed
some hints in this direction...

    PLANNING_FOR_TROUBLE




09/12/07

Burning Man 2007 (don't be thrown by the babbling about Gary Snyder at
the outset... I decided to lead with what I was thinking about
instead of what happened):

    BURNING_WILD

My (very) little project for this year's "Burning Man":

    LIGHT_OF_RA

Gary Snyder's "A Place in Space", my pick this year for
book-to-read-at-burning-man (yes, I'm the life of the party):

    RYDING_THE_BURN


08/18/07

A hint that the writers working on this
mediocre movie understood that there are
some details missing from the Joan Vollmer
Story:

    FACE_DOWN

And there were a few more short pieces (added back on 07/29/07)
about my Joan Vollmer researches:

    JOAN_HERSELF
    ROLLICKING_FUN_DISCUSSIONS

08/13/07

Anti-war demonstration in SF from back in 2003:

    DEMONSTRATION_SATORIS

A directory page, linking the following three items:

    HONEST_DELUSIONS


   "Corporate Media Lies!"; "My god.  What do you people believe?!"

       FINGER_TO_FINGER

    A lobbyist upset at the notion of Washington "corruption":

       BELTED_UP

    Who do you identify with?  That's who's rights you defend:

       SELF_IDENTIFICATION



08/12/07

A notion that there are unspoken arguments that need to be addressed:

    UNSPOKEN

For example, the idea that the Gulf War is about providing the US
with a supply of cheap oil:

    ALL_ABOUT_OIL

    Suburbia is the enemy of "community":

        THE_DESTRUCTION_OF_COMMUNITY

    Sketching a path to a future with energy problems solved:

        ENERGY_FUTURES

    A 70s idea I've always liked: solar power satellites:

        POWER_SATS

    A brief mention of a common problem that we have:

        WHOS_WE


Sketching out the case against racism:

    DAY_FOR_THE_RACES




08/11/07

Vegetarianism:

    VEGE

Daniel Lazare contra Vegerarianism:

    DANIELS_BEEF

The obvious connection between vegetarianism and tea-totalling:
both are about avoiding things known to be bad for you:

    ALCHOHOLIC_AVOIDANCE

Cafe Gratitude considered as an example of insane beliefs as a
motivation for doing good, creative work:

    I_AM_CURIOUS

Abortion debate, definitions of humanity:

    ABORTION

The "helpless" deserve protection:

    HELPLESS

Drawing arbitrary, but crucial distintions:

    DRAWING_A_LINE

Minor squib about what I mean by "humanity" (probably
this needs to be expanded some time):

    HUMANITY

More interesting squib about the problem with
"tough cases":

    TOUGH_CASES




08/11/07

Chris Cutler: "the market is not a simple measure of
what a community of people wants":

    FILEDOWN_POP




08/11/07

Socialized aka Universal Health Care, my changes in attitudes:

    HEALTH

A (minor?) objection to Michael Moore:

    SICKO_PROBLEMS

So why isn't "The Market" working better?

    EXTREME_HEALTH




08/10/07

Bob Black and the distinctions between work and play:

    WORK_AND_PLAY

A brief summary of ethnographic evidence cited by Bob Black
(this one isn't very interesting as it stands, I must say):

    HOBBESIAN_HOAX

08/10/07

A continual pattern: lefties beating each other up (because
it's too dangerous to hit anyone else?):

    CONTRARIAN_WARS

On quoting unreliable characters...

    DUBIOUS_FLARE

My changing attitude toward Bob Black: from superficial appeal
to deep revulsion:

    THE_ANTIBOB

Digging into the minutia of one of Bob Black's many low points:

    BLACK_TAR

A small collection of Bob Black quips:

    BLACK_HUMOUR




08/08/07

I.e. San Francisco and New York, which would not be legal to build
in any place with "modern" zoning regulations:

    ILLEGAL_LANDS




08/03/07

The perception of different elements ("objects") in music:

    SPECTRAL

Many faces of Buddha:

    MANY_FACES


A note that Cage compositions need sympathetic performers,
despite what Cage may have thought about it:

    POSITIVE_CAGE

Toward a set of esthetic rules:

    RULE_OF_REVERSALS




08/03/07

Writing up the Patti Smith show at CBGB's Second Avenue
(New Year's Eve, at the close of 1977):

    CBGB_SECOND_AVE

The "what was your 'first concert' ?" game:

    FIRST_CONCERT

David Bowie live, on the "Low" tour, 1977:

    ART_DECADE

"Hot Tuna", live at the Suffolk Forum on Long Island:

    HOT_SUFFOLK_FORUM

Out of the mouths of anthropologists: Ziggy Stardust.

    MEASURE_OF_MAN



07/26/07

Three items about names:

    THE_IRON_KEY


07/25/07

Not terribly new remarks about "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen",
moved here from NAUGHT_ZERO:

    WEIGHTY_CONCEIT




07/22/07

Quote from an A. E. van Vogt novel, about beauty as the
driving force:

    GOLDEN_SPHERE




07/18/07

Lawrence Lessig takes on "corruption":

    WIDER_FIGHT
    THREAT_MODELS
    VAST_RIGHT
    WEB_LOG_COMMENTS

07/18/07

Going into CNN shock (I lead a sheltered life):

    MOST_TRUSTED_NAME

Ideas that do the opposite of what they were intended to do:

    INTO_THE_BRAINPAN

An optimistic hope for widespread American cyncism:

    CHILDHOODS_END




07/17/07

Thorne Smith's "The Night-Life of the Gods":

    PAGAN_DREAMING




07/15/07

Maybe this is just a detail, but it's one I care about:
the WTC was actually a bunch of really awful buildings:

    FALLEN_TOWERS




07/15/07

Fragments toward some experiments in inter-tribe communication:

    FINGER_EXERCISES

Giving up on the Economist's "shenanigans":

    RHETORICAL_LOAD




07/15/07

The notion that conspiracy theories become less plausible as
they require larger numbers to be in on it:

    TOO_MANY_ACTORS

Group think makes it difficult to hold on to a minority POV:

    RED_PILL_BLUES

The rigged election of 2004:

    INCREDIBLE_BUSH

United in our right to a diversity of states of denial:

    A_CHOICE_OF_DENIAL

"Tips for terrorists" are perhaps in bad taste, and yet...

    TIPS_FOR_T


07/15/07

Problems with the notion of "racial profiling":

    PROFILE_OF_STUPIDITY




07/15/07

The appeal of spontaniety to the un-:

    SPONTANEOUS_COMBUSTION




07/14/07

A recent issue of "The Wire" magazine ("underground" music
of various stripes, definitely not including the white):

    LONDONS_GRIMING

 When it gets too easy to burrow down into the underground, then what?

    THE_ACOUSTIC_FIREHOSE

A few odd locations in the United States I've never heard of:

    THE_WIRE_AMERICA

Capsule reviews of music, quoted from "The Wire" in abbreivated form:

    THE_WIRE_ENCAPSULATED






07/14/07


John Cage versus improvisation:

    THE_CAGED_SELF

On the appeal of "spontaniety" to the over-intellectualized:

    SPONTANEOUS_COMBUSTION


07/07/07

Social networking sites think of themselves as toys, and
hence will inevitably become played with, by well-funded
attempts at subversion:

    THE_TOY_WEB

07/07/07

"Have faith" as a learning strategy:

    FAITH_CYCLE

07/07/07

The difficulties with "considering the source":

    SOURCES_CONSIDERED




07/07/07

The "Plat_Forms" contest: an actual attempt at getting real data
on the efficacy of different programming languages:

    CASE_STUDY_3


07/07/07

Quote from a Patti Smith poem...

    AND_WHO_EXISTS




06/13/07

The short life expectency of POCs cast as second-banana heroes:

    GUNGA_DIN_SYNDROME


06/13/07

Making a random selection of three entries from Paul Goodman's "Five Years":

    GOODMAN_GAME


06/13/07

Two barriers: "having nothing in common" and "being too close to the problem":

    TOO_CLOSE_TOO_FAR




06/10/07

About "Macross 7": a case where popular art can be "difficult" art...

    SEVEN_NOT_PLUS
    PLEASED_TO_MEET_YOU
    SUN_BLAST
    MACROSS_PLUS
    SEVEN_SHELLS
    SIVIL_LIES
    SEVEN_HEARTS




05/28/07

I got a million of them:

    HALF_APHORISMS


04/29/07

About Dave Eggers "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius":

    STAGGERING
    WHAT_AM_I_GIVING_YOU
    BOTH_WAYS_LOSE
    SATURATED_NIGHT_LIVE
    CORE_DUMP
    STAGGERING_SAN_FRANCISCO
    SPARKS
    ON_A_STICK
    UGLIEST_HOUSE
    BOXING_MEANING


    THE_KRYPTONITE_ESCAPE
    UNREALITY_POPS
    THE_WHITE_BOG
    AMBIGUOUS_APPEAL
    NEO-IRONY
    BEAUTIFUL_LOST
    SLITHERING
    TREAD_OVER
    PUSH_THROUGH
    LOW_FLAME




04/14/07

 A directory page, about:
 "jargon, definition, paradox, neologism...
  problems with words as mental tools."

    DENOTE




04/12/07

An 80s fad for castles made of jargon:

    JARRING




04/11/07

About Plato's...

    PHAEDRUS




04/11/07

A grand treatise in-progress on the nature of
"religious wars" in the nominally "technical"
world of software:

    LANGUAGES_OF_POWER
    MODEST_PROPOSAL
    COMPUTER_SCIENCE_PROOF
    CSG
    RELIGIOUS_ISSUES
    THE_DAMIEN_PRACTICES
    THE_PERL_AFFAIR
    SIGILS_OF_POWER
    GENTLE_ART_OF_PROGRAMMING
    CASE_STUDY_1
    CASE_STUDY_2
    PAUL_GRAHAM
    HACKING_GREATNESS
    LITTLE_OLD_ME
    TECHIES_FALLACY
    THE_HOLY_PIGEON
    RIGHT_TOOL
    KNOWLEDGE_IS_GOOD
    PRACTICAL_IDEALS
    THE_COMPUTER_PHILOSOPHERS
    REPTILLIAN_MONOTHEISM
    REAR_VIEW_PIONEER
    AGAINST_BOREDOM
    WELCOME_TO_HELL


04/10/07

A case in point, where some connectivity is good, but too
much would probably have been bad:

    CONNECTIVITY




03/30/07

Gene Simmons vs. Terry Gross:

    SERPENTINE_KISS




03/23/07

Noting that "neo" is derisive:

    NEONEO




03/19/07

Colin MacInnes on Jazz:

    HOME_PLANET




02/17/07

On the lifestyle of Homer Evans:

    LIFE_OF_HOMER




02/16/07

Another trip to New York around the beginning of the year,
and various related thoughts:

Being in New York city, 2007:

    THE_BRIGHT_GRAY_LANDS
    EAST_VILLAGE
    CYPRESS_HILL

Being in New York, 2003:

    EAST_OF_THE_EAST
    BLACKOUT_2003

Differences between New York and San Francisco, in particular in arts scenes:

    COMMERCE_IN_CULTURE

Differences between New York and New York:

    BIG_HERE
    MANHATTAN_WOODY

Improvised music in New York:

    ABC_NO_RIO

... and in the Bay Area:

    BEANBENDERS

The New Years poetry marathon, again:

    ST_MARKS_CHURCH

A few of the poets

    BUSHYEAGER
    IIJIMA

Being out on "The Island":

    LONG_ISLAND
    ON_THE_ISLAND

Cities vs. 'Burbs:

    SUCKING_VORTEX

Musing on the utility of gender pronouns and what other tricks
like that might exist:

    GENDER_FIXS_AND_UNFIXES

Brief thought about the death obsession of Tibetan art:

    TIBETAN_METAL

Conmtinuing with a possibly silly business... creating handles/nicknames
for the various members of friends and family I feel like talking about
on occasion:

    CASTING
    INWOOD_ANGEL
    KLEE
    BIG_WALTER
    VILLON
    SUN_FISH

A defense of Dave Eggers against the neopunks:

    EGGING_ON

What does it mean when I think someone

    KNOWS_SOMETHING


02/15/07

Yes, at long last it's the doomfiles handbook of style.  You can rest easy now:

    STYLISH_HAND


02/14/07

Reflections upon Burning Man 2006:

Hipster-against-hipster:

    BURNING_IRRITATION

The great RV debate:

    BURNING_ROVER

Musical taste:

    FROZEN_SOUND

The Flaming Lotus Girls piece:

    BURNING_SERPENT

Does it makes sense to worry about how much it makes sense?

    CRITIC_OF_THE_BURN

Some people think about what-it-all-means:

    BURNING_PHILOSPHY

Burning man policies on advertising and such:

    RULING_OUT_RULERS




02/14/07

Sound and meaning, explication and inference:

    DOUBLET

Explaining what a "doublet" is (fluid flow):

    IN_THE_LIMIT

    FRACTURED_WORDS

Squib about "The Wire", the British music magazine:

    NO_D

The Mona Caron/Chris Carlsson future:

    AFTER_THE_FLOOD


02/14/07

Elements of formal poetry (rhyme, rhythm) depend on region accents:

    ACCENTUATE_THE_DEVIATIONS




02/12/07

To a large extent, this batch of stuff is just "infill",
I'm adding some (unfortunately, minor) pieces to try to
smooth over some (percieved) rough spots in the "browse
sequence"... which has undergone a lot of re-arrangement of late:

Quotes from David Byrne about the CBGBs days:

    FORGIVE_ME_FOR_LIVING

A quote of an old Paul Goodman proposal for a car-free Manhattan:

    CAR_FREE

The word "anathema", an example of a definition doing a near
complete flip from it's original meaning:

    ANATHEMA

A "directory node" of sorts, classifying a number of my
other writings according to the "snobbery"/"reverse snobbery"
axis:

    TURNING_THE_SNOB

In outline, the "writing pulp" game:

    RECOMBINANT_PULP


02/08/07

Franco Moretti's "Distant Reading":

    HOW_SOFT_A_WHISPER

Mention of Heinlein's theory that there's a connection between
poor health and becoming a writer:

    UNHEALTHY_MINDS

Writeup of my reaction to the play "King Lear" (not very
positive):

    LEAR

02/07/07

An outline for a projected work "How-To Think":

    THINKING_HOWTO

Quoting the eight principles of the "Eight Track Mind":

    8_TRACK_MIND

Writer's are the last people you can expect to speak
truth to editors:

    EDITED_REALITY

02/01/07

Editor's reserve the right to stick writer's work
with whatever title they feel might sell:

    UNDESERVED_TITLES

01/31/07

My '07 reading list, in progress:

    NAUGHT_SEVEN

About the novel "Moonraker":

    RAKED_OVER
    FUEL_OIL_BLACK_PEPPER_VODKA_MARTINI

01/28-31/07

I've got my tools working that let's me swap chunks
of doomfiles nodes around in the browse sequence...
so I've been doing a lot of rearrangement of where
the "NEXT" links go.

As far as new material goes, the new stuff isn't so new:

A quick list of "recommended" picks:

    CRITICS_CHOICE

The full introduction I wrote to "The Beat Generation",
including the point that Kerouac was originally being
awfully loopy when he claimed that a "beat generation"
existed:

    BEAT

And related to that, we have a bunch of relatively
redundant, whiney material that no doubt sounds even
more egocentric than usual: a wikipedia flaw the "no
original research" requires that you report
consensus wisdom even if you know it's wrong:

    WRONG_CONSENSUS

And all this is just some still older material, split
out into it's own pages:

    CLUB_DUMAS
    POLYGYNY
    HAIR
    ATTACK

01/23/07

A ranking system without too many ranks.
The question: "Did you get anything out of it?"

    BRENNER_SCALE

01/22/07

Filling in an explanation of another handle:

    DANGERBABY

01/20/07

Writing down a few of my old raps...

Attitudes toward characters in "Gone With the Wind";
The puzzling reputation of "Alan Alda" as a male feminist.

    GONE_WITH_THE_WIND
    ALAN_ALDA_PARADOX

01/20/07

Pre-Rand "Objectivism" in a 1939 episode of "The Shadow":

    VALLEY_OF_THE_LIVING_DEAD

Minor note about ghost writers who've used the "Ellery Queen" label:

    QUEENS

01/20/07

Various musing about pornography, and people's reactions to pornography:

    SCREAMED_WITH_JOY
    ORIENTAL_TWIST
    WITHIN_OR_WITHOUT
    EROTICA_GAMES
    SOMETHING_VISUAL

01/15/07

Some small bits about words in Carr novels:

    WELL-QUALIFIED
    JUST_MEN
    WORDS_WORTH

01/15/07

Opon reading the Sept. 1952 issue of "FUTURE":

    FUTURE_DECLINE

01/11/07

The importance of "flow" in language (you can't reduce a
text to bits without losing the text):

    ATOMIC_THOUGHT
    ORIGINAL_DOOMFILE

01/11/07

Doom Research: trying to find the source of the phrase
"The Voice of Doom":

    THE_VOICE_OF_DOOM

01/09/07

Patti Smith's latest written poetry:

    PENNYWORT_AND_DOLLAR_SHORT

01/09/07

Problems with the "personal odyssey" angle in writing:

    PROBLEMATIC_TALES

My personal political odyssey:

    BROKEN_WING

The original wedge between me and the left: nuclear power:

    NUCLEAR_SPLIT

01/06/07

Sontag's post 9/11 remark about "cowardice" and the strange reactions:

    COWARDLY_LIONIZED

01/05/07

Voting seems quixotic, particularly when you're off on the edges anyway:

    ON_EDGE

01/05/07

Techniques for arguing from ignorance:

    EMPTY_HAND

01/03/07

being morbid vs a sense of meaning

    THE_BIG_LIFE

12/19/06

Conquest by not conquering:

    STRATEGY_OF_ALEXANDER



12/12/06

About the journalist Robert Fisk, his book about Lebanon, "Pity the Nation",
and his ill-treatment at the hands of right-wing "bloggers":

    PITY_THE_NATION
    SAVAGE_NIRVANA
    GLASS_BUBBLE
    SMEAR_THE_MESSENGER
    THE_TRUE_FISK
    TOUGH_BEING_TOUGH
    JOHN_REED

Amy Goodman at the San Francisco Green Festival: on the
importance of the victim's point of view:

    SWORD_OR_SHIELD

But "Democracy Now" isn't perfect... for example, it was
light on election fraud issues:

    BLINDSPOTS_LEFT

New rights, new lefts, and us left behind somewhere:

    THE_BUSH_LEAGUE

Argh. More beatnik poetry.  Did I mean to publish this?

    THE_PINBALL_GAME_OF_HISTORY

A brief discussion of usenet:

    WELL_USED

Some disputes among new left and old:

    STRIKES_BACK

Some bitching about the mainstream media again
((maybe these should be stuck together into one page)):

    BELOW_THE_FOLD
    SMALL_THUMB_RULE

The light dawns that one of our allies has been acting evil (a surprise,
I know).  At long last I take a definite side on Israel-vs-the-Mideast:

    THE_SOLDIERS_HAVE_COME
    FALL_FROM_ZION
    PERFECTLY_CLEAR
    CYCLE_OF_VIOLENCE

    OFF_THE_FENCE
    TIPPING_THE_BANDWAGON
    LITTLE_DRUMMER_GIRL
    ZIONISTS_OF_WALT_WHITMAN
    PARALYZING_DIALOGS
    HOPELESS_DEBATE

    START_THE_CLOCK

Paul Krugman and smear campaigns.
Also, the rich-getting-richer theme.

    KRUGMAN_FUNNIES

Problems with neutrality:

    NEUTRAL_ADVOCATE

On kill-ratios...

    PROPORTIONS

About the slaughter of innocents:

    STATEGIC_BOMBARDMENT
    HIROSHIMA

Some more platitudes about how it isn't as bad as it seems:

    BLANKER_THAN_YOU_THINK
    CLOSER_THAN_YOU_THINK

Assasination okay?  Musing on the meaning of the means...

    ASSASSINS_OF_GOVERNMENTS
    MEANS_WHAT

Tracking my political "progress":

    MIRROR_UNMIRED_OFF_THE_WALL

Pondering the need to understand the motives of the "great",
and speculation about the True Character of Bush Jr.

    PSYCHO_REGIME

Poorly named node about talking to the wall.  I mean, the people.

    THE_BORG

Irresponsible speculation about hired-guns infesting the discussion
groups of the internet:

    THE_ROVERS
    SURROGATE_TRUTH

On talking to the jailers:

    PENETRATE_THE_SHELL

Difficulties of deception:

    HUMANITY_METER

So, which is it?  Don't bother worrying about motives, or not?

    PEGGED_AT_ZERO

A stub:

    PENDULUM_SHOVE

Difficulties with maintaining integrity during political
engagement:

    POLITICAL_ANIMALISM

Another wikipedia failure scenario, the trouble with consensus:

    CONSENUS_ILLUSION

No "mandate" for the right:

    MANDATE_ZER0

And admission that I'm probably wasting my time (and yours --
but that's your problem) with this political stuff:

    CLONING_AROUND


About fraud in the 2004 US election (beginning with a
book review of the Freeman & Bleifuss book):

    LAST_EXIT_FOR_DEMOCRACY
    SOFT_PEDDLED
    BURNED_IN_2004

But not even I buy into *every* conspiracy theory out there,
a case in point:

    AN_INCONTINENT_TRUTH

On the subject of being slow:

    SLOW_ARC
    SWIFT_BOATS_SLOW_MINDS

Pulp as the first mover:

    TWISTED_PATHS

The obvious problems with an over-worked, under-defined term:

    TERRORISM

Musing upon the practice of what the "bloggers" have been calling
"fisking":

    THE_AUTUMNAL_WEB

War as PR:

    DAISY_CUTTER_DIPLOMACY
    TAILSPIN
    UNDERSTAND_JUSTICE
    MEMORY_EXERCISES
    MORAL_VALUED


Miscellanious:

    TRIBAL
    LIGHT_AND_DARKNESS
    HETEROPHILLIA

09/23/06 - 09/28/06

The theory and practice of Agent Provocateurs:

    PROVOCATEUR

Making a few (now obvious) points about "Competitive Advantage":

    ADVANTAGE


09/16/06

John D. MacDonald, Travis McGee and Me:

    DEEP_BLUE

    DEEP_BLUE_Q   (03/09/19)

    WASTES
    IN_A_BLUE_HAZE






09/12/06

The fifty book challenge ("can you read 50 in a year") and some
related pages:

    FIFTY_IN_ONE
    HOWLERS
    FIRST_THOUGHTS
    BEARDLESS_IN_PARIS
    ZENITH_ANGLE
    MODERN_FORGERS
    A_DOLLS_HOUSE
    STYLES_OF_CARDBOARD
    DEAD_HARE
    GHOST_FINDER
    FIFTY_MINUS
    SABATINIS_CHIVALRY
    CANON_FIRE
    KRUGMAN_UNRAVELING




09/11/06

About Richard Kostelanetz, and the problem of "cronyism":

    MULTI_LEGGED_KOSTELANETZ
    END_OF_INTELLIGENT_WRITING
    MERIT_INSTITUTIONALIZED


09/11/06

Paul Goodman's magnum opus, "The Empire City":

    EMPIRE_CITY
    FIRED_HOLY
    CROWD_FEEL
    PARTICIPATORY_TRUTH
    UNIFORM_AND_SHAPELESS
    WITH_WHAT_WEAPONS
    COPE
    SANE_AS_HAMMERS
    ANOTHER_CLOWN


08/21/06

At long last, wrote up the tale of Stuart Reges,
fired from Stanford for going up against the
"War on Drugs":

    REGES



08/20/06

Another quote from Don Quixote:
    THEATRICAL_RANTING


A brief complaint about T.H. White's "Once and Future King":
    WHITE_WASHED


08/13/06

Some speculation about the evolution of the Emma Peel
character from Catherine Gayle... and associates:

    THE_VENUS_SMITH


07/15/06

The Shadow of the novels was originally supposed to
also be the guy who narrates the radio show:

    SHADOW_OF_THE_ETHER


07/11/06

Making fun of the myth of High Art again:

    HEROIC_ART

07/11/06

Speculations on what might be the right way to
handle a cliche. "The Temptation of Luke":

    DARK_SIDES

07/11/06

Some additional pages on Jane Jacobs and
(distantly) related things:

    POWER_BROKE
    SUBURBAN_HOPE
    AUTOMOTIVE_GUILT
    AMERICAN_LOVE

06/26/06

Added a long over due tribute to Jane Jacobs (who died a few months
ago), and some stuff about traffic patterns in Bali and what this
says about human nature...

    JANE_JACOBS
    THE_GREAT_CITY
    CURRENCY_EVENTS
    MEGAPOLISOMANCY
    CONSTELLATION_OF_CITIES
    ZONED
    HOLLOW_AMBER
    THE_ROAD_OF_BALI
    HUMAN_NATURE

06/23/06

What does the blogging habit do to bloggers lives?

    ENGAGEMENT

One of my many mildly deranged teenage schemes, reforming my life
by writing a mystery novel:

    THE_MIST

06/23/06

Shifting attitudes toward the fiction best seller list:

    SELLERS_OF_THE_BEAST

06/19/06

Talking about the Christopher Fry play, "The Ladies Not for Burning":

    BURNING_LADY

06/19/06

A little bit of stuff about scene-ology, with emphasis on
beatniks, and also on the expat artist scene in Bali in
the 1930s:

    GOING_UNDER
    SIGHTING_SCENES
    PASSING_AS_PASSE
    SERIAL_HIPSTER
    LATE_STAGES
    BEATNIK_59
    GENERATING_BEAT
    PASSAGE
    COLLAR
    THE_JUVIES
    PROTO_GOTH
    PROTO_PUNK
    AMBITIONS
    IN_THE_NEWS
    JUST_MISSED
    FUNNY_PART
    AUTHENTICITY
    BLANKING_THE_CANVAS
    SO_FAR
    LOST_IN_BEAUTY
    A_HOUSE_IN_BALI
    TO_SEE_OR_TO_DO
    BALINESE_MUSIC
    FIRE_DANCE
    PRIME_DIRECTIVE
    SECONDARY_WANDERING
    PITA_MAHA
    STRANGE_TRIANGLE
    EXPAT_PATHOS
    OFF_OFF_CAMERA
    SUBCULTURE
    CITIZEN_DOOM
    WAYAN_SIKA
    MIXED_UP

06/18/06

Talking about mutations in comics and mutating comics...

    BRAND_X

06/18/06

Some things I started writing awhile back on hybrids of
western and world music, and the odd prejudice against them:

    VIETNAMESE_MUSIC
    ETHNICALLY_AUTHENTIC

06/18/06 and 06/28/06

Firming up a little about what I know about what is
known about the ellusive Shadow:

    SHADOW_LAUGH
    SHROUDED_IN_SHADOW

06/17/06

More about being a college radio DJ, this time with emphasis
on the problem of doing live mixes of multiple sound sources.

    BRIGHT_GRAY
    NUTS_AND_BOLTS

03/24/06

Ibsenism, it's the latest craze:

    PEER_GYNT




02/28/06

Patti Smith on the subject of civic responsibility:

    CAMDEN_TOWN




02/27/06

The problems with trying to fuse
the sciences and the humanities:

    FUSILE_LINK
    BRIDGE_OF_STARS
    STRUCTURAL_FAILURES
    BANG
    GOLDEN_SPIRIT


02/27/06

Returning to "War and Peace", and it's evident theme of
"flawed genius", perhaps somewhat contradicted by Tolstoy's
display of it...

    SURFING_HISTORY
    FLAKES_OF_GENIUS
    TIGHT_PIECES

01/09/06

A resolution to read more junky schlock rock biographies:

    DIONYSIAN_SOAP


01/08/06

American Literature sucks, a case in point, "Huckleberry Finn",
and a minor remark about finishing books just so you can complain.

    ANTIAMERICAN
    HAWKING_FINN
    SECURING_RIGHTS

01/08/06

An old insight about insider hipster sabotage producing bad
government/corporate art, prefaced by a note about odd sexual
references in the titles of old pulp fiction...

    FREUDIAN_PINK_SLIPS
    SABOTAGE

01/03/06

Some basic material about James Blish's

    CITIES_IN_FLIGHT

12/29/05

Big block of minor stuff (that took forever to write none-the-less).
Bit of free-associating here -- which I don't do nearly enough of
these days, but still maybe it makes the non-linearity of it all
a bit too non...

Mystery novel author takes on Russian novelists!
Tolstoy strikes back.

    RUSSIAN_PLOT

Small bit of Carr's rumbling, this time about Ibsen, of which
I hope to have more to say in the future:

    RUMBLING

Slight (?) bit about how both the left and right seems to have
it in for "intellectuals" (at least on some occasions):

    DAMN_INTELLECTUALS

Trying to punch through an obvious thought or two, about punching
through the stone cold trail into the minds of idelogues (or something):

    STONE_COLD

Odd little nostalgia piece, putting together bits I remember from
50s/60s television, attacking those damn intellectuals:

    WEAK_REEDS

Once upon a time, the boobs felt self-conscious about it:

    KICKING_SELF_IMPROVEMENT

Trying to answer the question about War and Peace from  WEAK_REEDS

    FAVORITE_SCENE

Free associating (?) possible misogyny in War and Peace:

    MISSING_GYN

And the tale of Cerebus, and Dave Sims infamous descent into misogyny:

    THE_LONE_HEAD_OF_CEREBUS

Sexism at Stanford, circa 1995:

    STANDING_WATER

Following the trail from  STONE_COLD

    MEMEONS

Working from memory, trying to come up with attacks on
modern art in the movies.   Companion piece to  WEAK_REEDS

    ART_AGAINST_ART

Carr's anti-intellectual intellectualism reminds me a bit
of Ix...

    ICKY_GOBBING


12/29/05

Really, these are some older pieces, extracted from  GAIMAN

    AMBER_GRAINS
    KICKING_SAND


12/26/05

An example of the way serial fiction can become an all-consuming
passion (it's a good thing I don't do soaps, eh?):

    SERIAL_LIVING

Serial publication, prevalent in the history of high art as well
as old:

    RETCON


12/15/05

Writing a bit about the way that attitudes toward sexaul practices
change... It'll be interesting to see if this one climbs higher
in my weblogs than  ACCIDENT

    NORMAL_PERVERSION

Around and around with transgression and puritanism:

    CIRCULAR_MOTION

True perversion:

    KNUCKLE

Against "Pornified":

    PORNFRIED

Patterns of anti-sex polemics:

    ON_NO_BACKS

The nature of humanity, again:

    ANIMAL

Musing on the dorkiness of "The Lifestyle":

    STYLE_IMPAIRED


12/15/05


George Sand, trying to argue Flaubert out of his famous schtick:

    AEOLIAN_EXHAUST

Transcendental sex:

    INFINITE_ARCH

Another Flaubert quote, on the sins of the romantics:

    SENTIMENTAL_TAIL




12/05/05

Back to punk and related subjects...

Some quotations from the eminiently quotable:

    PLEASE_KILL_ME

Problems with "punk=stupid":

    AUTHENTICALLY_STUPID

    DISCO_SUCKS

Group loyalties...

    SOUL_SO_DEAD

At home with (one of) my tribe(s):

    HOLY_COATS_OF_BLACK



11/26/05

Intellectual puzzles considered as...

    TRAPS


11/26/05

Typing up some of my file of Algis Budrys quotations:

    AJAY
    HOMILETICS
    HORRIBLE_TRUTH


11/24/05

This stuff isn't really new... mostly I'm just
rearranging the material that was shoe horned
into the one node HEINLEIN:

    FORECAST
    COVENTRY
    TO_SAIL_BEYOND
    POOR_BEAST


11/20/05

I stuck in some links to this a long time ago, it's
about time I pushed something out to fill the spot:

    FULL_MONTAIGNE
    PRIMARY_MONTAIGNER


11/20/05

Some basic philosophy on the layout of tracks on a CD:

    TRACKSIX




11/02/05

Back to the Shadow again:

    LONG_SHADOW
    TWISTING_SHADOWS
    FURY


10/30/05

A crazy attitude in older pulp fiction, and in modern politics:

    GOOD_GUYS_DONT_DO_BAD

A lecture on doing well with style:

    PRIDE_OF_CRAFT




10/30/05

A history of "The Saint", pondering the appeal, pondering what
is even there to have an appeal:

    NAME_OF_THE_SAINT

Silly bit about using words by feel without knowing dictionary definitions:

    UNCTUOUS

A list of ghost-writers, a piece that doesn't quite gel:

    CHASING_GHOSTS

The first novel written by Charteris:

    THE_WHITE_RIDER

The first Charteris Saint story:

    SMELL_THE_TIGER_BURN




10/30/05

A series of pages about Arturo Perez-Reverte's "Club Dumas",
first considered as an example of a sub-genre, unusually
prominent in recent years:

    ESOTERICA_THRILLERS

From "Club Dumas", a "selfish gene"-style theory of books:

    INFECTIOUS

No more "innocent readers", eh?

    RENDER_INNOCENT

Once again, a strange counter-factual lament (and a rant about
"Goldfinger"):

    HISS

About games:

    A_GAME_OF_DUMAS

Fictional characters with a life of their own, e.g. Holmes:

    A_STRANGE_LIFE

A quotation of Stendhal by Perez-Reverte, about books one might
die for:

    QUOTE_OF_QUOTES

That Dan Brown book:

    DA_VINCI_FLU

Ambivalence about royalty:

    DOWN_WITH_ARISTOCRACY
    RED_ON_BLACK

Comparing translations without knowing the original:

    LANGUAGE_BARRIERS

The omniscient narrator an obvious cheat:

    ALL_WRONG

Moliere's rather mild attack on religious hypocrisy:

    TARTUFFE


09/07/05

Some Ed Sanders inspirational advice:

    METHOD_ATTACK

Have some respect for "low art":

    HIP_REDUCTION

Take high art low and low art high:

    UP_AND_DOWN

More material about Bond/Fleming, upon reading the
biography by Pearson:

    BONDED_TIGHTLY
    BONDED_COURIER
    COUGHING_UP_FLEMING
    CASINO_MUNDANE
    DIGGING_FLEMING
    FINAL_ASSASSINATION
    DEADLY_CIPHER
    BOND_AND_DETERMINED


09/05/05

Predicting fashions in mutable flesh...

    GAY_APPAREL

About Don Quixote...

    QUIXAND




07/17-22/05

Added more beat research data:

    BURROWING
    NEAL_AND_JOAN
    SUBTERRA

Because I'm still:  LOOKING_FOR_JOAN_VOLLMER



05/22/05

A 1992 review of a bad, self-conscious attempt at a cult movie.
Nerd meets wild babe, redux:

    HIGHWAY61

Unreliability of memory:

    IN_THE_IRON_MASK

Dumas' "Count of Monte Christo", a book of many problems:

    COUNT_CHRISTO




05/22/05

An intellectual maneuver you might call "the honest strawman":
addressing simplified/purified forms of your opponents position:

    INTO_THE_STRAW




05/06/05


Ian Fleming studies is not a pretty business:

    BANG_BANG

About the oddly fascinating though definitely flawed Russell
Jacoby book, arguing that a generation of intellectuals
have been lost to the academic world:

    LAST_INTELLECTUALS

Identifying an absence:

    VOID

    FLORID


05/03/05

An afternoon at the Cherry Blossom Festival in San Francisco's Japantown:

    CHERRY

The Walt Whitman Shopping Center in Huntington Station, New York:

    MAULED

A little bit about Gruen, the original architect of the shopping mall:

    GRUEN_HILLS_OF_EARTH


04/20/05

A brief listing of facts (hopefully not mere "facts") that I
think are "underknown".  This was intended to be read on the
radio, which is one excuse for it's terseness.  It's essentially
incomplete (at a minimum, it needs links to supporting information):

    UNDERKNOWN




03/29/05

Miscellanious dreams, and the favorite word "elide" and a made-up
term, "anastructing" (creating to formula):

    STATE_OF_THE_DREAMS
    ELIDE
    ANASTRUCTING


03/12/05

At long last, I'm beginning to talk about some of Paul
Graham's essays... the topic at hand being essays
themselves.

    THE_GREAT_DEBATE


03/10/05

Problems that I had with some high school assignments:

    THE_QUESTION_OF_ESSAYS

02/23/05

Some (not terribly new) thoughts on tactics for activists:

    INSIDE_AND_OUT

Cheap suspense in cheap thrillers:

    CHEAP_SUSPENDERS

Reader? Viewer?  A difficulty in talking about stories
without specifying the medium:

    WHOS_ON_FIRST

My point-of-view concerning the point-of-view of narration:

    POV


02/14/05

Some "quick" notes on Delany's "1984", leading into some
thoughts on visions of human nature.

    ALLUSIVE
    BETWEEN_SOUL_AND_FATE
    WANDERING_PURPOSE
    ASTIGMATIC

Which reminded me about Tolstoy's "War and Peace" which prompted
me to add a little about it...

    WAR_AND_PEACE

Much of what I did add is all just quotation, though:

    HISTORYS_SLAVE
    WARRING_PIECES
    CARBONUNDRUM
    AGAINST_FREEDOM
    DERANGEMENT
    MOTIVATION
    TOYING_WITH_TRUTH
    TOYING_WITH_TECH
    TERRIBLE_KNOWLEDGE
    KUTUZOV
    DIFFERENTIAL_OF_HISTORY
    TREED
    BIG_SKY

An aside about my problematic problems with Delany's Neveryon series:

    NEVER_SAY_NEVERYON


02/14/05

A little history of the role of some magazines (particularly
pulps) with some emphasis on the Shadow:

    BLACK_MASKS
    PULPED_STURGEON
    ROMANCE_OF_THE_REAL
    AUDIOVISUAL_TRADITION
    GHOSTS_OF_THE_SHADOW
    LIGHT_OF_SHADOW



02/07/05

A quick sketch of the problem of receiving technological gifts
that have problems...

    MORE_OR_LESS
    OPTIONS_ARENT
    TV_RULES
    LUCK
    FAQS


02/04/05

H. Rider Haggard "King Solomon's Mines":

    QUARTERMAIN

Ross MacDonald, successor to Chandler:

    THE_CORPSE_BENEATH


02/04/05

The cost in human life of power generation is all but ignored in our
calculus:

    BUTCHERS_BILL


02/04/05

Music, context, meaning --

    GRAIN_OF_TIME

Some babbling about the way I read stuff these days:

    TRACERS
    TABS

02/03/05

Edging toward yet another musical metaphor for social organization...

    COUNTERPOINT
    HIGHLY_THEORETICAL_NOTES

Talking about a recent (cf. only 5 years old) Bond flick:

    WORLD_ENOUGH_ALREADY
    BOND_NOVA
    STANDARD_STANDARDS

Working with what you've got, even if it's trash...

    OUT_OF_THE_DUMPSTER
    ENDLESSLY_ROCKING

Pulp fiction as a literature of evolutionary development:

    MUTATION
    NOVELTY_AGAIN

Shameless bragging:

    DROPOUT

Tedious personal detail:

    TRACES_HOME


01/28/05

An Algis Budrys quote.  I've got a million of 'em:

    SHARPER_LANCES

01/28/05

An odd epitaph:

    DUMAS


01/22/05

Trying to record my take on Delany's always
controversial Dhalgren...

    DHALGREN
    ORCHID_PETALS
    FUNCTION_OF_WORD_PATTERNS


01/18/05

Working my way through Susan Sontag's "On Camp":

    SUNDAY_CAMP
    SUNDAY_MORNING
    SUNDAY_LOW
    SUNDAY_LOVE
    SUNDAY_CONVENTION
    THE_FALCON

Ayn Rand's slightly different view of the campers:

    AVENGING_RAND

A few related pieces:

    ESCAPE_TUNNEL
    ROUND_AND_ROUND


01/8-10/05

Tricks of memory and muscle memory and attitudes toward tales of
your own stupidity:

    DANCING_ON_PINHEADS

War game strategies, the drive toward moderation, my
determination to find extremes:

    PLAY_BALANCE


11/28/04

Various sorts of inversions, "pendulum swings":

    FLIP

A brief discussion of

    ANARCHY

11/19/04

The dangers of wearing

    MASKS

11/17/04

Some more on the skiffy related stuff I started writing
here with:

LOST_WORLDS_OF_UNKNOWN_TOMORROWS


    FALLEN_FUTURES
    NULL_HINGED
    MULTIPLY_HUNG
    ETERNAL_HUMAN
    HUMAN_WONDER
    LUCIFERS_HAM

11/12/04

A little bit of stuff about markets & madness & governments &
libertarian success and failure...

(Let us tarry while I wonder leak and leery from many
a furious brawl of forgotten ore).

    BALANCE_OF_PRAGMATISM
    DEATH_OF_THE_REPUBLIC
    TONE_DOWN
    SPORTS_LOGIC
    TARAIAN_CONTRA_SUV
    STATISTICAL_INDIVIDUAL
    DOOM_CONTRA_TARIAN
    MADNESS
    RATACT
    PENGUIN_FIRM
    SECRET_GUILT
    MANY_FREEDOMS
    NATURALLY_FORCED
    EFFICIENTLY_INVISIBLE
    PROPPED_UP
    GET_SMALL
    MONOCULTURE
    DOWN_SO_LONG
    THE_WORKS

10/24/04

Broke out pieces of BATESON
as separate nodes:

    INFLECTION
    BOTTLE
    ENTROPY
    SHIFTS
    BLACKBOX

10/24/04

Added a few notes about Theodore Sturgeon's obessions,
notably the hive-mind notion:

    ONE_GESTALT
    SYZYGY_MATTERS


09/18/04

Some notes about James Bond (largely the Ian Fleming
version, though not entirely):

    LIVE_TWICE
    ODDS_ARE
    WINNING_VESPER
    GALE_OF_THE_WORLD


09/18/04

Conan Doyle's "The White Company". Chivalry considered as a
an achievable ideal for a world without much practical hope:

    LIGHT_EXPECTATIONS

A small hole in Rebecca Solnit's otherwise impressive defense
of optimistic philosphy of engagement:

    DARK_HOPE

09/18/04

The rules of fiction, i.e. the problem of coincidences:

    CHANCES_ARE

Modesty Blaise, the comic strip and the prose works:

    BLAZING

Blood-thirstyness as a realism criteria:

    TASTE_FOR_DEATH

The movie pulp fiction (among others), and the fatal attraction
of twisted villians:

    BRAIN_PULP

09/17/04

"The Emperor's New Mind" by Roger Penrose, a flawed argument
perhaps, but a flawless book of remarkable intellectual
honesty:

    MIND_PENROSE

A listing of books at the core of my world view (or
close to it), and a common thread among many of them...
the "two cultures" cross-over:

    BIBLES

And a list of the also-rans:

    APOCRYPHA

And one that comes no where near making either list...
E.O. Wilson's "Consilience", a slippery book of questionably
honesty, in my opinion:

    CONSILIENCE_PRIZE

Wilson, argues for what sounds an awful lot to me like
Jungian archetypes, in particular for the sign of the snake:

    SERPENTINE_FEARS

Some clarification (?) is Wilson arguing for an understanding
that goes from the grand abstractions down to the atomic
level, or is he satisfied with evolutionary principles that
arise higher up than that?

    DOWN_TO_THE_BOTTOM

Some notes on Science as a social process:

    DANCING_AT_THE_SCIENCE_SOCIAL

The nature-nurture debate, and it's near irrelvance:

    NATURE_OF_THE_WALLS

Primate Pride:

    MONKEY_KITCHEN

Brief run-down of the old "Two Cultures" distinction,
and the probably useless changes it produced in the
educational system:

    TWO_CULTS

About C.P.Snow's truly excellent novels, well worth
reading if one can stay awake through them:

    GENTLY_SNORING_SNOW

The general futility of educational reform:

    AGAINST_STUPIDITY

When standardized tests lead to standardized education
(and as an aside, a complaint about the ways the big
name schools can be really lousy):

    TEACHING_THE_TEST


08/14/04

Mostly, accumulated thoughts on experimenting with
different approaches to reading and listening:

    TOTAL_IMMERSION
    CONSUMING_FLAME
    BROKEN_LINES
    PROSE_POEM

    TRICK_OF_ATTENTION


08/07/04

Some minor insight into the character of RMS and Linux Torvalds
from reading their as-told-to's:

    SIDES_OF_THE_COIN
    FUN_WITH_IDEOLOGY

08/02/04

Some meandering about old ideas concerning the inevitability of
conspiracy, the low opinion held of people who speculate about
them, standards of proof for different situations, etc...

    THE_THEORY_OF_CONSPIRACY
    STANDARDS_OF_PROOF
    MOTIVATIONAL_BIND
    UR_CONSPIRACY


And a brief criticism of one thing Camille Paglia has
said about male role models, which touches on the
whole "high art and low" complex...

    ROUGHLY_READ

07/23/04

Note about the concept of imposing a linear "browse sequence"
in hypertext works such as the doomfiles:

   BROWSE_SEQUENCE


07/12/04

The "who was the first" problem:

   FIRST_PUNKS

Richard Hell's worship of existence:

   GOD_OF_HELL


07/06/04

Added some remarks from a year ago or so on early encounters with
postmodernism, the co-incidence of it's incidence with object-oriented
programming, and some proposed defences the "Social Text" gang could
have used, if they weren't actually idiots:

     THE_SO_CALLED_HOAX


07/06/04

  A classic film that really is a classic:
    FORBIDDEN_PLANET

  Adventure fiction, ancient greek vs protestent
    THE_ILIAD_AND_THE_PROTESTANT

  Mistakes in the control room as a proof of skill:
    ALL_PANDAS_THUMBS

07/05/04

Actors as compulsive liars:

    FLIES

07/05/04

Added much exposition on the works and attitudes of the
mystery writer John Dickson Carr, with some emphasis on
his contempt for high culture, and some musing about where
those kind of attitudes lead to...

    THUNDER
    UNLIKELY_CONFESSION
    CAVERNE_DES_SORCIERES
    FALLEN_FASHION
    BOOKSHELF_OF_CARR
    A_THING_OF_WIND_AND_LIGHT
    CASTLE_SKULL


07/04/04

A year or two ago, back when she was still doing
the young and innocent schtick, I was severely weirded
out by Britany...

    CREEPING_SPEARS

A probably ill-conceived, back-handed tribute to
Ashley Adams that I've been sitting on for a few
years, but what the hell:

    ROLLING_A_MODEL


Also added some meanderings about the difficulty of
being *really* eclectic in music:

    BRAND_ECLECTICS


07/04/04

Over the last five years, I've occasionally written one
or two little things discussing things related to the
bay area improvised/creative/new music scene, beginning
with the complete lack of an adequate name for it:


    IMP_PERVERSE
    POWER_OF_NAMING
    THE_NAMING_OF_MUSICS
    ZORN_ADVANTAGE
    LIVE_YOUR_OWN_DAMN_BOOK
    NOISE_ABOUNDS
    EXPLAINING_THE_INEXPLICABLE
    PLONSEY_IN_THE_OCEAN
    WHEN_THE_END_IS_NEAR
    SCENIC_ROUTE
    CATCH_5_7_TIME
    INCOMPREHENSIBLE_DESIRE
    CONCRETE_MUSIC
    NEWMUSING9


06/24/04


Incompetence is a selling point.

   ALPHAVILLE



06/19/04

Dashiell Hammett's "The Glass Key", a novel that
writes about the nature of human consciousness
by avoiding any expression of it.

    GLASS_KEY

Quote from an earlier Hammett story:

    FOGGY_BOTTOM

Lawrence Sterne, author of "Tristram Shandy", clearly also
had some insight into this subject:

    SHANDY_TOWN_MIND

A long overdue (?) summary of the chapter from the "Maltese Falcon":

    G_IN_THE_AIR

Aside about the true nature of action/adventure fiction:

    PRAISE_OF_ONES_ENEMIES



06/18/04

Something I wrote a few months ago that seems related to the
HONEST_JOHN sequence...
Not to mention DEFINITION_GAME.

   UNIVERSAL_ART


06/17/04

Digging into the esthetic->ethics notion I settled on long
ago:

    BEAUTIFUL_GOODS
    UGLYBEAUTY
    METHODICAL_PARADOX
    PRETTY_TRUE
    RECURSIVE_DEFINITION
    CLOUDS
    DEFINITION_GAME
    EIGHT_RAVING_BEAUTIES_COUNT_EM

Largely useless attempt at "applying" the esthetic->ethics
notion to a real world social problem:

    LESS
    LESS_LESS

Ducking sideways into an abstraction generation game:

    DEALING_THE_DECK
    THE_DECK
    ACCORDION_THE_DECK
    STRANGE_EQUATIONS


When technological improvements aren't really:
    DEATH_OF_THE_ALBUM


06/07/04

Once upon a time, I read
"The Geography of Nowwhere" (1993)
by James Howard Kunstler,
and wrote up a bunch of things
I liked and disliked about it.

I am now promptly adding it all to
the doomfiles, three years later:

    NOWHERE_MAN
    NOWHERE_WARNINGS
    NOWHERE_OIL
    NOWHERE_MODERN
    NEW_URBAN_HERESY
    NOWHERE_PUNK
    GEOGRAPHY_OF_GEOGRAPHY
    NOWHERE_TRIP
    NOWHERE_POLICY
    NOWHERE_SMOKE
    NOWHERE_TRANSIT
    NOWHERE_VICTORIANS
    PEDDLING_SUSTAIN
    MODERN_TRAP

06/05/04

About Homer Evans of the Elliot Paul novels.
Escapism/Engagment...

    TAKEN_LIGHTLY

A favorite subject of mine in my continuing studies of
the popular trash of yesteryear, the Alcohol Comedy:

    ALCOHOL_COMEDY


06/05/04

Added some stuff about the way the culturally conservative
(such as Heinlein) react to artists like John Cage and
Robert Rauschenberg...

    HONEST_JOHN
    KNOW_WHAT_I_LIKE
    A_BIT_FAR
    BRIGHT_SILENCE


06/02/04

Added stuff I wrote a few years back about the Tolstoy novel
"Anna Karenina", along with many a quotation:

    ANNA_KARENINA
    MORAL_CHOICE
    PILLAR_OF_LEAR
    THE_ABSTRACTION_GAME
    THOUGHT_AND_ACTION
    PEOPLE_UNGROUNDED



04/03/04

Added an approach to non-fiction book reviewing,
an application of the rough/fine approach...      TWO_LEVEL
an in depth look at just the first thirteen pages:

    FIRST13

A stab at applying the above ideas to Joel Garreau's "Edge City":

    EDGE_CITY

Some (probably redundant) musing (about some ancient ideas)
about on-line debate and the kind of discourse it fosters:

    LIGHTNING_WAR

04/03/04

My reaction to the "Tim Berners-Lee" book,
which I actually wrote a few years ago:

    WWW

A comparison of old-style command-line ftp to
the web:

    JOY_OF_FTP


03/24/04

My take on the complex subject of...

   BICYCLES
   BIKE_SAFELY

   These follow URB and
   flow into MAPGAME
   (which I've moved from where it was originally parked).


03/16-18/04

More beat generation stuff...
Much is known about who Joan Vollmer
had sex with and what kind of drugs
she did.  Lately I've been wondering
what she said and thought about:

    LOOKING_FOR_JOAN_VOLLMER
    GO_
    LITOUT
    ON_JANE
 TOWNIE_MARY
    BEATGEN_ANGRYMEN
    JUNE_ORIENTATION   (Really, added:
                                                           Thu Jun 17, 2004)

02/23/04

Some discussion of one of Asimov's Foundation stories,
published in the 1945 issue of Astounding:
    DEAD_HAND

    SECOND_PARAGRAPH

02/02/04

Added Genesis P. Orridge quote in
   INDUSTRIAL_RECORDS


01/29/04

A self-fufilling negative slogan, in action:

  MONKEYS_BUTT


01/06/04

Bruce Sterling's Legs, and the Viridian Movement:

   STERLING_DISTRACTED


12/19/03

Stating some obvious truths about the mainstream musical world:

    MUSICAL_DAMAGE

Some stunning news for you: Punk did not begin with The Sex Pistols.

    PISTOL_WHIPPED


12/19/03

More musing on the sfnal mindset:

   FANTASTIC_VEIL


12/15/03

   THE_SECRET_MASTERS_OF_DESTINY

                   It all goes back
                   to Van Vogt.

12/14/03

About Samuel R. Delany's "The Madman":

    SYSTEMS_OF_THE_MADMAN


12/14/03

Added 24 (!) nodes, all more or
less about Science Fiction, past
and future...

    GENESIS_OF_THE_CYBER-PUNKS
        A golden oldie: what cyber-punk
        meant to me, back in 1985

    LOST_WORLDS_OF_UNKNOWN_TOMORROWS
        Is science fiction dead?
        Or merely transmuted?

    FUTURE_SHACKLED
        The brakes are on.

    DECLINATION
        Of the West.

    FUTURE_FRAGMENTS
        Glimpses of what might be done with SF

    DARKWOOD
        Awkward critique of fuziness in "LOST_WORLDS..."
        points the way toward "Deep SF" in "IN_DEEP"

    NEOLOOGIES
        Advantages of making up your own terms, when the
        existing ones seem too cluttered.

    IN_DEEP
        Staggering toward a manifesto for a new movement
        in SF.  (Probably needs work.)

    HARD_PROBLEMS
        The soft underbelly of Hard SF.

    RAYMONDS_FOLLY
        Taking on the esr thesis that libertarianism and hard sf
        are what SF is really about.

    THROUGH_THE_LENS
        Aside about E.E. Smith's Lensman series.

    WHEN_THE_DEVIL_QUOTES_SCRIPTURES
        Just a redirect to send you to the page
        "Libertarianism for People Who Don't Give a Shit"

    FLAME_SPOTTERS
        How to find the good stuff?

    MODERN_DECAY
        Warm fuzzy regard for the icy charms of modernism.

    EXPOSURE_TO_VACUUM
        Taking on the conceit that reading SF requires
        you to be smarter than the average litcritter.

    TELL_ME_TRUE
        If you have something to say, then say it.

    PURLOINED
       The advantages of being passe

    TECHNOLOGY_SECTIONED
       Complaint about what newspapers think "technology" is.

    STANDARD_FUTURE
       The oversimplified curves of futures vs. history

    AG_SPARKS
       Quotations flying off from Chairman Sterling.

    ESSAY_ON_THE_UNDERGROUND
       (1) a radio show set (2) theme of said set: taz the enemy
       of the revolution.

    NOTHING_IS_PURE
       Idealized futures vs. messy realizations

    TIME_MIND
       Living with the idea of change

    TOADKEEPER
       Stub (at the moment) about Edward Brenner.


12/05/03

Doom takes on Hollywood!  A discussion of the *X-Men* movie!
Only out of date by a few years and a sequel or two...

    NO_CREDIT

12/02/03

Yeah:

    SHAMELESS_BEATNIK_POETRY

You want to make something of it?

11/30/03

An outline of the methods of dealing with
the "Social Epistemology" problem raised
in GARDNER:

    NEED_TO_KNOW

    TWO_LEVEL

    GOLD

    CRAZYIDEAS
    (Review of Robert Ehrlich's "Nine Crazy Ideas in Science")

10/09/03

Movements to change language usage always
run up against difficulties:

    STUBBORN_WORDS



10/08/03

Slice of life, bumming around in North Beach:

    BURST_OF_ROSE
    BOLTHOLES

Another slice, sailing trip to Angel Island:

    ANGEL_ISLAND
    CONTEXT_AGAIN

And a slice of "life", watching an old serial on video:

    MYSTERIOUS_DOCTOR_SATAN
    SATANS_PLACE

(All about maintaining a sense of place in film and more
ranting about the incompetence of Hollywood in doing what
they're supposed to do best.)


08/05/03

About the James Thurber book:

   13CLOCKS


06/18/03

Added review of Bardini's book about Englebart: "Bootstrapping".

    ENGLEBARTS_BARD
    FURTHER_REFLEXION
    YOU_KNOW_TOO_MUCH
    DEEPKEYS

01/10/03

My reaction to the infamous "The Wildones" flick.

    WILDONE

One more time: the problems with didactic art,
and a lament for the lack public spirt among
the citizenry.

1/2/03

Some (fairly slight) remarks about Balzac:

   BALZAC

With a few satellite nodes:

   FRENCHREVS
   GORIOT


Pushed out a cluster of things beginning with this:

  GARDNER

   An extended review of Martin Gardner's
   "Fads and Fallacies in the Name of
   Science", with emphasis on his failure
   to address the problem of social
   epistemology ("How do we know what we know?").



12/21/02

And now, never before published in this venue...

   STEIN

Notes on the novel Frankenstein, with some attention to the
actual technology that Shelley had in mind (note, nothing
much about electricity), followed up by some wild
speculation on how the Frankenstein scenario might have
played out if you didn't have some narrowminded notion about
the un-holiness of "playing God" i.e. creating a new
lifeform.  (Actually I wrote this stuff a few years
ago, and read it on the air in March 2000... and posted
a copy to alt.gothic in 2001 or so...)

Also put out some entertaining (to me) ranting
about a bad mystery novel from 1928:

   GREENE_MURDER
   COMPOSITION_UNITY_AND_CLUELESSNESS
   HIPSTERISM

Some things about Beatness and Authenticity:

   CREBBS
   THE_SAUCE


12/17/02

Minor piece about early encounters with the
music of Sun Ra:

     MISSING_THE_SUN

Rambling about the novel the "Diceman" and the idea
of living randomly:

     DICE

Excessively detailed description of a random bike
ride game I play sometimes:

    MAPGAME

A mapgame ride to McCluren Park.  Musing about
descriptions, the art of connotations:

    McCLAREN_PARK

A cross-roads of some random writings about randomness:

    RANDOM_CONNECTIONS

Kevin Kelly's "Out of Control", and the bit about Sullivan's
work with system adaptability vs a connectivity parameter:

    CONTROL

Some old, probably excessive, ranting about the Flaubert
novel "Madame Bovary", it's cyncism, and some dark
suspicions about why it may have been so well-regarded by
those who regard it well:

    BOVARY

About Chaim Bertman's autobiographical novel, and the goal
of total honesty, complete nakedness in writing... and maybe
an example of not quite achieving it:

    STANDUP_TRAGEDIAN

A quote from the same, about extreme attempts
at preservation becoming a kind of destruction:

    FLORENCE


And this stack has got a hell of a lot of stuff in it,
which I'm not in the mood to describe in detail.

Note: idea for a privacy sigil, to keep yourself out
of the major media.

Note: Odd notion of a generalized drag force as an
alternative to individual control or centralized
control.

   FAST_MEDIA
   SUBCULTS
   MEDIA_FAST
   DRAG


Oh yeah, and this little piece about
the speed of beat vs. style of dance:

    DANCE

And an even littler paradox about the
appeal of games:

    GAMES


11/3/02

The node SURVIVAL is supposed to
establish what may be a stunningly obvious point: the
purpose of human life is not just to live, and hence you
can't come up with a complete, rigorous moral/ethical code
based on the needs for individual or group survial.

While writing this, I decided I needed to extract this
bit from the DRUGS node and give it a node of its own:

     HAPPY_BREED

(About the John Sladek story.)

And similarly, it turns out that it makes more sense to move
the "vanilla existentialism" stuff from IRONTHORN to:

     LIFE



10/19/02

Brace yourself, I'm about to press
the "irony" button:

I wrote this material, in which I
discuss the problem of writers
who ruin things with later re-writes:

   FIRST_THINKS_FIRST
   NOW_AND_LATER 

The point being that maybe you should
just go with your first thought, and
never revise once you've published.
Stop questioning the judgement
of the version of yourself that was
probably more familiar with the material
than you are now.

Then I started thinking about where this
should go in the doomfiles "browse sequence".

Then I proceeded to rip apart the existing
browse sequence, and try to re-arrange everything
into a new order.

        Who knows what damage I've done,
        I certainly don't.

Other new nodes added while I was doing
this "great" re-arrangement:

Phil Jose Farmer's _Maker of Universes_ series,
and it's relatives:

   MAKER

Tidbit about improvisation in music:

   IMPULSE

Notions about how to create creative music
(perhaps ala Eno's infamous deck of cards):

   SOUND_ADVICE

Pretentious little bit about terror at the inadequacies of
rationality:

   WASTELAND

The tendency to pick something to center your world
view on that's very often obviously bogus:

   FALSE_CENTER

The act of naming, with an eye toward the problem of genre
names in music:

   ACTIVE_NAMING

Musing on the definition of City:

   URB

Brief listing of some of the purposes of music:

   PURPOSES_OF_MUSIC

When music has nothing to do with music:

   VORTEX

On the popularity of H.P.:

   LOVECRAFT

Diamanda Galas = perfect, but perhaps not sincere.  So?

   GALAS

Another vanilla existentialism quickie:

   LIFE

Misconceptions about Leonard Cohen's "Sisters of Mercy":

   MERCY

Misconceptions about pop-music lyrics in general:

   TURNING

Yet another scheme: pop music that is not pop music:

   SUBVERSIVEPOP

Early encounters with Suzanne Vega:

   NEWFOLKS

Why I am not that cool:

   EDGESCUT

The Strange Case of Freeman Dyson... constantly brilliant,
though somewhat inconstant:

   DYSON

Whew.

10/04/02

Wow, nearly a year since I've added something to this
mess...  Anyway, took a short piece about a trip to New York
that I wrote last June, and picked a place for it (after the
UNINTENDED->AGES sequence... it would be funny if
chronological order was the right thing to do now, recording
the natural flow of the thought...):

   REDEEMING_NEWYORK

Breaking that theory immediately though, by putting a bunch
of the alt.gothic.bookworms material (reviews of Lewis's
"The Screwtape Letters" and Twain's "Letters from the Earth"
and so on) after the old "GODDEATH" node, which is funny
because GODDEATH totally contradicts the MORTALGOD piece
it leads up to:

   GODDEATH
   SCREWTAPE
   LETTERS_FROM_EARTH
   AUTO
   MORTALGOD

10/05/01

Just wrote:
   UNINTENDED

This is some jamming around the idea that the
limitations of human intelligence lead to a disconnect
between the desired and the beautiful.

In the "browse sequence", I'm putting it (and a slight
companion piece, AGES) after SENSATIONAL, and before NEOPUNK
(though getting it closer to PUNK might make more sense).

09/08/01

Added BURNING_MOMENTS, a description of some experiences
of my first trip to Burning Man in 2001.

   BURNING_MOMENTS

I stuck this immediately before DRUGS (after SLOWCULPT),
though I suspect it will ultimately reside between SPLIT and
STURGEON.  (The general
reasoning: the Burning Man folks might be interested in
my philosphy, such as it is, about recreational drugs.)

And while I'm at it, I'm pushing out something I wrote six
months ago: musing about the probable impracticality of the
legendary/mythical "Key Parties":  KEYPART

It seemed to fit pretty naturally between STRANGER and
GROUPS... it didn't take an hour to figure out where to put
something for once.

08/08/01

Some ramblings about greenesque refrigerator design,
the emergency preparedness problem.
Includes a stab at a new slogan:
"The emergency is your life", which I suspect
will not catch on.

   GREENISH-TINGE

04/14/01

Got around to adding my reaction to the movie
GROOVES (a fictional account of the SF Bay Area
rave scene):

     GROOVEN_IMAGES


06/30/00

Wrote up the events surrounding Bill Sheffield's suicide:

   WAYOUT

(and after a bit of thought, I appended it before
the AMERICANBEAUTY node in the browse sequence...)

05/01/00

Babbling about the movie "American Beauty",
and it's main theme, seeing beauty in
unlikely places:

   AMERICANBEAUTY
   SENSATIONAL

Also wrote on the subject of the apparent
fear of sex that can be inferred from our
behavior, if not from our tastes in
fiction and so on.

    EXCUSES
    SEXUALENGINEERING


04/30/00

And writing that stuff below left me
once again musing about truth, cynicism,
believability, persuasiveness and
so on...

    GENTLER

Oh, and I also just decided to add
this silly thing:

    WHATSNEW

And re-wrote the TOP
to reflect the recent changes.

04/29/00

Added some new nodes going into some more detail
on my theories (and very occasional practice)
in picking up women:

    BACKING_IN
    HOOK
    LINES

04/25/00

Restored the browse sequence,
putting the Friday night whining
about relationships up top again.    DRYSPELL

It doesn't reflect the condition of
my life anymore, but it remains one
of the better examples of a doomfile
node, and the subject probably has
a certain universal appeal...


04/10/00

Fixed the browse sequence
(there were some bugs, where
skipping forward wouldn't take
you to the same places as
skipping back; skipping forward
actually literally skipped most
of the nodes; punching 'next'
would take you into an infinite
loop and so on...).

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