Category Archives: Society and culture

Society and culture

An unavoidable use of time

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[updated 2011-10-03] Here’s a crazy armchair hypothesis: parents (“good” ones, or equivalents thereof) are worth about 20 years of realtime effort. They’re there to save you anywhere up to a generation’s worth of heavy lifting. A socio-economic birthright. In other words, every child is supposed to start life with a cosy +20yr launching pad; an effect which in an ideal world filled with ideal parenting / equivalent parental guidances and equal birthrights, could be normalised away… putting everybody on the starting block at “0″, in real terms. (Of course, there’s always the finicky problem of nature vs nurture, but just play along, will ya. I’m talking mostly about nurture, here anyway). Continue reading →

"Slutwalk"… (**sigh**)

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Google “Slutwalk Toronto” and then come back – I can’t be arsed to bring you up to speed. But what I wanted to say was this:

The wound-licking of a self-proclaimed “slut” (her/their words, not mine) has been hitched onto the “attire has no causal link to rape and even if it did, it should not be allowed to stand in court” wagon.

And it really is too bad, because now the wagon in question, already struggling under the weight of all that common sense and just barely inching into the puritanical collective’s grudging acceptance, has now been saddled further by a FUD-ish memeplex it did not want or need. As the wheels churn in place and the crapulence flies into the faces of average Janes everywhere, lets calmly smear away the crap and take stock of things, shall we? Continue reading →

The Jaron Lanier effect

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The Jaron Lanier interference pattern was bound to ripple its way back into my awareness, sooner or later. I blame this squarely on how long I stared at the pages  in the giant black+white coffee-table photobook ‘DREADS‘… in which his was one of the portraits.  And one of my favourite writeups, I have to say.

I immediately latched on to his picture / profile in the book because he was the first person I knew of who openly called himself a Renaissance Man. It was the first time I’d seen someone “confessing” to being a generalist / polymath… a way of being very close to my heart. So I think I have prolly had a thing for Jaron ever since then, subconsciously…

On a serendipitous jaunt to Coles bookstore at lunchtime recently, I found a book that resonated with me and after flicking through it a bit, I flipped it over and saw a thumbnail of the author. I kept thinking, where have I seen this guy? Why does he look so familiar…! :o)

Anway… Jaron Lanier is none other than the author of You are not a gadget, a book in which “The Blankness of Generation X never went away, but became the new normal” is actually the title of a section. (ouch). My main gripe about the book though is that Canada didn’t get the cool UK cover… Continue reading →

2010, and a belated viewing of '2001: Space Odyssey'

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I promised myself that passing snippets every few years on telly would not suffice, and that I needed to see for myself the whole thing, from beginning to end, properly… and to find out what all the fuss was about. So I did it. Finally.

I just saw Kubrik’s 2001 Space Odyssey:

It was bloody gorgeous, is what it was. By which I mean the kaleidoscopic technicolour ride through the Jupitan wormsponge multiverse, culminating in a sort of starbirth into the organic roiling folds of some ever-forming manifold of the most awesome effing SPACE that could ever fragging exist… WAS BLOODY GORGEOUS.  But there’s other random things I came away thinking about… Continue reading →

"We need women in IT"… really?

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This topic has kept cropping up at me over the last few weeks, so… well, that’s a sign isn’t it? Plus, I can’t think of a better way to end my blogging drought. In what follows, I am going to reduce the entire, multi-faceted IT industry to a specific phase in the systems development life-cycle: the development phase. Because I think software development / coding is the activity which really pushes this issue…

And I shall restrict this activity further to coding in a traditional software house, where bespoke/original software development takes place in contribution to a core technology or platform. Continue reading →

…at which the video installations must be avoided at all cost.

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It’s that time of year again.
If you enjoy long queues followed by severe anticlimax, no planning whatsoever is needed to enjoy Nuit Blanche.

For everyone else, some strategy and forethought helps reduce the probability of fuming at 2am and kicking yourself for having been suckered into one non-attraction after another.  For this, using the itinerary/planner thing on the scotiabank site is helpful. Some things at Nuit Blanche are just going to suck. Do your research ahead of time and avoid them from the get go.

Disclaimer: If you’re a modern artist, especially if you are showing something mildly (or even very) incomprehensible at Nuit Blanche, you might be upset at what follows. Just ignore it and remember that lots of people out there love what you do, and that’s what counts. I’m not an art critic. BUT…

Continue reading →

A Propos of Appropriateness

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In spite of it’s surprisingly non-objective qualities, truth has a certain allure. Especially where it is allowed to bubble to the surface within human society and culture, rife as those spaces are with subterfuge, role-playing, sycophancy and deceit in the service of survival instincts.

At around the time I met the Tao Te Ching /I Ching for the first time (around age 18) I came across a written explanation of something that trumped the pure unadulterated truth. It even had a name. It was was called “appropriateness”. Continue reading →