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November 2009 Archives

Sunday, 1 November 2009

Duration: 49s

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I’m selling the above MacBook Air on eBay, no reserve, with AppleCare until 24 April 2011.1 If you’re looking for a computer from a trustworthy source, look no further.

Notes
1 This MacBook Air is different from the one I recently sold which belonged to Pam.

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

Too much cannot be said about Lévi-Strauss’s influence over what would later become cultural studies. His structuralist approach to sign systems and the production of meaning in social behavior still has power even after the advances of postmodernity and poststructuralism. Today, the world has lost one of its great interpreters of human activity.

Wednesday, 4 November 2009

Between

Haunting and elegant, Between cinematically forges unconscious connections between self, environment, and otherness.

Lose/Lose

In Lose/Lose by Zach Gage, you maneuver through a fleet of alien craft. The alien craft do not fire at you, no matter how many of them you destroy. Some of the alien craft try to ram into you, and these can be evaded or destroyed. Every time you destroy an alien craft you are awarded one point and a random file is deleted from your home directory. When your craft is destroyed, the application Lose/Lose deletes itself from your hard drive.

Sunday, 8 November 2009

Strong bodies make strong minds make a strong country. Welcome, United States, to the Twentieth Century.

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

Two videos of veterans returning to their families.1

Baying Beagles

Fathers Surprising their Children

Notes
1 Ancillary-only roles for women duly noted. I also can’t help but think how many familes of all kinds will never have such reunions.

I present to you Number 23. 1 2 3

Notes
1 From T.R.A.G: Mission of Mercy.

2 la la la la laaa

laa la la la la la la laaa laaaaah!

la la la la la la laah lah la!.

3 Will critical video game studies one day be able to fathom such art?

11/11

morning

Ante Meridiem

night

Post Meridiem

Friday, 13 November 2009

I giggled at 51 seconds. I am a bad person.

Duration: 1m 18s

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Wednesday, 18 November 2009

Style Rookie, about.jpg

Her blog is a peculiarly lucid view into the life of a young fashion nerd. She has poise, courage, style, and wit.

She’s 13 years old.

Thursday, 19 November 2009

I’ve been following/scanning the arguments regarding speculative realism, object-oriented philosophy, and object-oriented onotology for more than two years now. What I found most interesting about the movement, such as it is, is that the principals are active and indefatigable bloggers.

From my vantage as a not-so-talented self-styled philosopher trained in English literature, cultural studies, and media analysis, the SR, OOP/OOO people are jangling the bones of philosophy long dead.

There is no question we only have access to the universe through our senses. Our judgements about that universe can be brought closer or farther from reality. We will never fully be able to determine how close the fit between reality and our perception of it, however close or far we may be. You can forge more words in this hall of mirrors but a hall of mirrors it will always be.

Friday, 20 November 2009

King gives voice to the criticism implicit in Sklenicka’s biography. Two excerpts signal King’s fury.

She was beautiful; he was hulking, possessive and sometimes violent. In Carver’s view, his own infidelities did not excuse hers. After Maryann indulged in “a tipsy flirtation” at a dinner party in 1975 — by which time Carver’s alcoholism had reached the full-blown stage — he hit her upside the head with a wine bottle, severing an artery near her ear and almost killing her. “He needed ‘an illusion of freedom,’ ” Sklenicka writes, “but could not bear the thought of her with another man.”


Carver’s savings alone totaled almost $215,000 at the time of his death; Maryann got about $10,000. Carver’s mother got even less: at age 78, she was living in public housing in Sacramento and eking out a living as a “grandmother aide” in an elementary school. Sklenicka doesn’t call this shabby treatment, but I am happy to do it for her.


GUI Method of Executing cd Into Selected Finder Folder

The title of this post isn’t exactly accurate. I’ll be the first to admit it’s a little misleading. Well, maybe more than a little. In fact, the title is a dissembling of epic proportion. But the SPIRIT of the title is alive and well in this mini-tutorial and, if you can believe that, you can follow along with the rest of this tutorial.

Typically when a user new to Mac OS’s UNIX layer needs to open a directory in Terminal, he or she will type cd and drag-and-drop the folder of interest onto the Terminal window. Like this

The High-Overhead Way

Duration: 52s

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Open Terminal Here, available on Mark Liyanage’s AppleScript Projects page, helps reduce this needless overhead. Download and unzip OpenTerminalHere.app and place it somewhere appropriate, like ~/Library/Scripts/. Combined with keyboard shortcut software, opening a Terminal window to any folder is now a matter of using Finder to navigate and pressing a single keyboard shortcut!1

The Mac-UNIX Head Way

Compare the methods in a side-by-side time trial.

Notes
1 I love Peter Lewis’s Keyboard Maestro which allows users to execute shell scripts, run apple scripts, manipulate GUI buttons, move the cursor, toggle menu items, define application-specific and applictaion-exclusive macros and a lot more. I have no relation to the developer of Keyboard Maestro other than as a licensed user.

Sunday, 22 November 2009

Saturday, 28 November 2009

Once they reach a certain size they seem to eat other bubbles at a faster rate, thus growing larger and in this form of a bubble war you end up with a bipolar situation with two large bubbles that rapidly eat all the other bubbles and eventually you get a situation where one bubble dominates and all the other bubbles are pressed into an annular space.


Monday, 30 November 2009

We know the deniers. They are our uncles and aunts, our coworkers, and postal couriers. They are our husbands and wives, our lovers and pushers. They deny global warming is real, that anything needs to be done about human contributions to greenhouse gases. We love them dearly and we don’t know what to say when they scattershot with claims like

  • The amount of greenhouse gases produced by humans is dwarfed by the amount produced by natural sources, so reducing human emissions is useless.
  • Global warming has actually recently stopped, and the earth is actually getting cooler!
  • The sun or cosmic rays are more likely the real cause of global warming.
  • Geoengineering is a more feasible way to reduce/reverse global warming than reducing greenhouse emissions.
  • And others.

Here’s how to respond.

The Monster Ball’s style seems [. . .] a cross between The Phantom of the Opera and Cirque du Soleil and its approach is direct, with Lady GaGa inviting her audience to take a bite of [her] bad-girl meat. At times, the dialogue is so realistic as to be banal—What's up, Toronto?—but who doesn’t want to see superpostmodernism’s diva0 in a woman-sized gyroscope?

[. . .] Lady Gaga's “electro-pop opera” is at least twice as entertaining and infinitely fresher than any stage musical written over the last decade.


Lady GaGa in Woman-Sized Gyroscope