TWITCH PITAS ][
--PORTAL--ARCHIVE--PITAS.COM--
Carl Sagan Had a Theory About Agriculture
] Really this kind of plant-human symbiosis makes a lot of sense (especially if you're high). Biologically it's not much different from bees pollenating flowers. #Ratmobiles and Ratjets of the Space Age
] I was never really a rat person but this guy totally is. This page from his Ratical.org site is devoted to his blueprints for rat-driven space vehicles. There's loads of content here besides, like the entire text 'Killing Our Own' a book (not written by the proprietor) about victims of US Nuclear tests. Seriously, lots here worth checking out, even if it hasn't been updated since 1997.His site is powered by hemp, the premier renewable resource.
#This is a Deceptively-Named Professional Association
] #] There's not really a difinitive site on Sniglets - and they aren't totally difinitive themselves. 'Spork' for example is listed as a Sniglet back in 1986 (which was the peak of the phenomenon, I think) even though the word was supposedly patented in 1970. It didn't make the OED until sometime this decade though.
] My personal favorite is "Point Blimfark" which means something like the speed a which a spinning object (such a ceiling fan or bicycle wheel) appears to start spinning slowly in the opposite direction. (There may be an actual scientific term for this phenomenon - it's caused because the refresh rate of the human eye is only like 30 frames per second and so if something's spinning just slightly faster than that, you'll see the same a given part of the object (a spoke or fan blade or whatever) reach the same point in space slightly earlier each time around. Things like the frame rate in films and the 60-time-per-second flicker of fluorescent lights accentuate this phemomenon). I couldn't really find a correct usage of this word in context online.
] Random links -
] Space Ghost interviews Sniglets creator Rich Hall.
] Infertility Sniglets. (Surprisingly the only other specialty Sniglets I could turn up online was this list of techie Sniglets that are all probably pretty passe by now.)
] Leave it to computer people to invent a term like Code Sniglet to describe a function that does not exist, but should. (Bonus! This function's actually pretty cool - a DHTML thingie to create resizeable panes in a browser window.)
] Sniglet of The Day. (Pressing your refresh button will make this the Sniglet of the Moment.)
] The original Illustrated Sniglets by Arnie Ten.
] Another long list.
#This is.
Can you tell the difference?
#Please don't make me sound like I'm vicious
] Article about Stephin Merrit that includes the story of the time he supposedly threw a bottle of water at somebody in the audience because they were talking during a song. #Henri Michaux's Mescaline Engendered Drawings (and their viral diagrammatic relevance to war).
Dharmadhatu and Existence A Buddhist reading of the chapter "Six o'clock in the evening" in Sartre's Nausea.
The Concept of Media Education Revisited: From a Classificatory Analysis to a Rhizomatic Overview by Seppo Tella (1998).
Rhizomatic Radio and the Great Stampede - this is a verbose book review.
What is a Rhizomatic Model? Yes, relevant to weblogging.
P.S. - A rhizome is a kind of plant that grows by sending out underground shoots, like a strawberry.
#Where this is really great is for the self-publishing writers like me. Personally, I would never expect payment for Twitch Pitas (and payment received for it would be passed on to a charity) because my pita is an outlet for my obsessive-compulsive behaviors and I would do it even if nobody else ever had a chance to read it (the stacks of notebooks filled with random thoughts that I kept in highschool attest to this), but things like stories and media I would treat differently because it's much easier to think of an mp3 or a pdf as a commodity. I've always thought - If there was a frictionless way I could charge somebody 5 cents to download a printer-friendly copy of a story I wrote, I would stop thinking about writing for print as a means of earning a living and publish everything on the internet. This could be it.
Seriously, if I could make 50 dollars a day writing on the internet (that's 1,000 hardcore fans who would be willing to pay 5 cents per day for my brain fluff) I would quit my job and write fulltime.
#'Oh yeah, that was me updating at work...'
- smak! -
#In Case You Didn't Think AntiDepressants Were Evil
] I've always thought Ritalin was a pretty evil thing, and the whole idea of drugging kids to make them act more like adults made them into asexual zombies - then I found a bunch of factiods here that say that Ritalin and Prozac also cause delusions and mania when given to children. Apparently enough delusion and mania to encourage mass murder.Antidepressants have never been shown to be safe for children, even though they're used to treat everything from bad grades to demonic posession.
Open Directory covers the scene once again. Breggin's anti-anitpsychotic page is also exhaustive on the subject.
Some of these guys are a little over the top with their distrust of the psychiatric profession; I wouldn't say it's root cause of all contemporary social breakdown but I believe what Dr. Dysart comes to believe at the end of Peter Shaeffer's Equus: by curing people of their psychological illnesses, we're sacrificing their spirits to the Moloch of normalcy.
(I've been itching to use Moloch in a metaphor since sn00t redesigned.)
#The Forgotten Weblogs of Times Past
] Started in April 96, and last updated in 98. Chronicles (with many surely-dead links) the life and opinions of a member of that dying breed, the psychedelic utopian.Dave also has a site-of-the-day blog which resides two days in the future.
# ] Also worth checking is the Dancing Blowout Comb. #
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Open Directory covers the scene exhaustively.
#] I've got to say though that while the rock scene (and it's pretty much the same w/ techno, the only other scene I really know much about) is pretty sexist - at least women are allowed to perform, which wasn't the case before the French Revolution. Back then all soprano parts were done by boys - or castrati (when a men would rather mutilate one of their own than let a woman sing - now that's sexism).
] Racking my brain the only woman composer I can think of before Pauline Oliveros (see links at the bottom of this page) who was recognized in her own time was Clara Schumann, who apparently made her husband Robert's carreer by performing his music while he moped at home and drank. And the only genre that I could think of where women play lead is slavic folk music - which is cool as fuck for so many reasons: all vocal, no instruments (music instruments have always been as complicated as the technology will allow and because of that really expensive and usually really cumbersome too - so vocal music = total performative freedom), sung in the natural voice (not an affected style like Western or Chinese Opera (which is done to make the voice resonate over the sound of an orchestra, incidentally), and it uses things like microtonality and enharmonic pulsing as part of the music - and emergent properties are cool because hearing is an extension of the sense of touch (sound is pressure on a membrane) and that directly involves the listener's body in making the music.
] I had been thinking of a themed mixtape sort of around this subject - bands w/ girl drummers and their relationships to the male singer/songwriter/lead guitarists in the band:
] Yo La Tengo - married.
] Quasi - divorced.
] The Carpenters - siblings. (And the exploitative rock industry killed Karen Carpenter as sure as it killed Janis Joplin (for example) but instead of being corrupted, Karen Carpenter died a wholesome death from anorexia.)
] The Magnetic Fields - queer.
] The Velvet Underground - buddies. (Acutally it was Lou who didn't want 'chicks' in the band but Mo Tucker joined the band anyway because they guys didn't know anybody who played drums. (And here's a trivia bit that'll be a Millionarie or Final Jeapordy question someday - Both VU and the Grateful Dead (at the same time in totally opposite sides of the country in totally different scenes) both originally called themselves 'The Warlocks.'))
] Music is often considered the highest form of culture because of it's universality (and abstraction) - that made me think of what Camille Paglia says about culture being what men have because they can't have babies. I don't totally agree with this (and I've had a rant about this on the backburner for awhile) but she has a point - especially when you consider that the overwhelming majority of the women who are involved in music (doing their own material/ideas and not the fantasies of 40something men like Britney and Christian Aguilera) are not breeders (okay...inside joke processed, moving on) - I don't want to get into the politics or the sexuality or the sexual politics, but it's just really apparent to me that most people who are seriously involved in music (and I'm using myself as the best example I know) are people who aren't into being at home raising children because making and appreciating music is taking up all of their time and energy. That's always been a big part of the utopianism in Western music (whether rock or classical) - that humans can be more than just the victims of nature.
] Anyway - once I find some good links about Barbara Ehrenrich I'll have more about this nature/culture thing.
#] I was introduced to the idea of scab-collecting from A M Homes' novel 'The End of Alice' (which I guess was her response to Nabokov or something (it's about a jailed pedophile serial-killer who is in a correspondence relationship w/ a highschool honors student who seduces 12yearold boys), but to me it was like a catalog of mom-worry suburban perversions with little effect. I missed the point, or ironic non-point or whatever she was going for). In that book Honors Girl's boyfriend keeps a scab collection and there's this whole ritualistic scene where she eats one to win the boy's affection (and it works).
] The one reference that came up over and over in Google was #120 in a list of things to do to worry your college roommate(start a scab collection, keep it in a locked glass case, tell your roommate you know he stole the key). Otherwise scab collecting seems to pop up in the context of dating gaffes (things not to mention on your first date: '#6 - your scab collection') or accidental ingestion ('...and after finishing the cornflakes his brother started complaining that his scab collection was missing!'). I never really thought of eating scabs as something sexy though - pimples on the other hand I can see - I had several friends in highschool who were into squeezing each other's pimples as an s/m thing. Maybe the scab collecting is just a little too taboo for any of us to want to admit to - (for the record, I used to pick until I was about 13 years old, ate them occasionally, but never collected).
] Scab collecting, (like collecting and fetishism in general)seems to be a pretty much a male practice (which maybe like gerbilling only exists as an urban legend anyway). The only record I could find was from this guy, who was actually inspired to start his scab collection by the grosser-than-gross joke.
#There's this sucky trend of weblog consolidation going down that's just like dot com consolidation - a lot of the nice mid-sized blogs are retiring, squeezed between the mega-sites (i.e. the 'webby five') and droves of wank-bloggers who beg links from popular sites like fans trying to catch beads of sweat shaken from a rockstar's head.
Speaking of...Arianna, are you there?
Hello?
What is Their Logo Trying to Depict?
] #Found on the bottom of ben benjamin's page on dreamless.org.
#] Somebody is obsessed with stolen office supplies.
] Somebody else is obsessed with stolen office supplies.
] It's like a Dostoevsky novel, isn't it?Phased Arrays. Set it to Auto Mode. So cool.
Interference Patterns. Freak. Out.
#Me: 'So what did you do today?'
Friend: 'Went shopping'
Me: 'Did you get anything?'
Friend: 'Just a CD...'
And then we'll both feel embarassed and go look for something to drink. Or whenever I see a cool person coming my way instead of making eye contact with them and being like - 'hey - we're both hipsters living in the damn suburbs' we'll both just kind of look at the ground and pretend like we don't see each other.
Really I have no reason to expect the album to suck except for the '4th Starwars Movie' precedent that just has me always expecting to be sold out by my culture for the rest of my life. That and it's a yellow album and I usually don't like yellow songs. (Not that say all of the good songs on 'Arab Strap' were green - 'Rollercoaster' was definitely light blue. And the song 'If You're Feeling Sinister' was totally peach-colored with white spots.)
One other disturbing trend - Progressive Titular Bloat. All great rock albums should have 1-word titles: -"Flood", "Murmur", "White", "Boces", "Loaded." B&S's first album - 'Tigermilk.' Okay it's a compound word, and a neologism, but still one word. The next album has 4 words in the title, then 6 words in the 3rd album's title. And now 'Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant," is not only eight entire words, it's two completely independent clauses separated by a comma. And since Stereolab's 'Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night' was like 4 brilliant tracks and an hour of filler for me, (and I don't worry that they've lost it because I feel the same way about 'Mars Audiac Quintet' which was recorded years before 'Ketchup' and 'DotsadnLoops,' both of which rule) - I'm worried that big titles = unfocused, meandering wank-rock.
I know, I know. I have to come to grips with the idea that great bands can start to suck and that doesn't mean that all hope for the future is lost. I just hope I don't turn into the kind of person who can't enjoy anything because he's too afraid of how bad it will be when the things he likes start to suck.
#Anyway - some snazzy links turned up:
Tales of Motel 6 written by Burning Man attendees.
The Spectre of the Lone Bowler.
A discussion from a site devoted to people who are smarter than you.
Some rock trivia. (Send me Game Theory mp3's or tapes and I will love you forever).
#Don't ask me where any of that came from - Oh yeah, Heather Champ: mirror portraits + Sweet N Low = Obviously, terrorist on the run.
You may remember my last internet-celeb-related dream, the slightly-more-plausible "I Discuss Stock Options With Jason Kottke" dream from early April.
On the topic (of dream logs, not Baby-Boomer terrorists masquerading as Web Celebs) there's always: Fishstick and of course Maura's Maura's Sleep Log.
] So in the dream I dreamed that I woke up from that and wrote about the dream in my weblog. That I was the first person to find the quicktime movie for this that commercial that had been mouldering in some online archive of hokey old commercials unseen for the last five years. I dreamed that the popularity of this scoop and the subsequent knowingly-hokey anti-ironic cultural revival it engendered (a la Ted Danson International made me the featured guest on a Good Morning America feature on weblogs.
Then my alarm clock went off - and for about five minutes I struggled to remember what the details of the dream were - the necessary keywords I would have to search to find the Quicktime movie of this dream online (which I wrote on a Post-it in my dream so I wouldn't forget).
Then I realized it was all futile and that I needed to shave before work so I had to get going.
#] Yes. That's a misquoted lyric in my title tag.
#] Now, no more self-referential posts about how the site works. I promise.
#] I guess if you've got a Napster and a fast connection you can track down the songs he mentions and sample them yourself - and buy them too to give the artists their 5% if you're within the hipness-radius of a major city and can actually find these things. (Otherwise you'll end up like me - scratching with copies of Ray Conniff records you got for 50 cents from Goodwill.)
] Peter's Browse-O-Tron reminded me of the existence of this site via a reference from Judith (via a reference to Nicholson Baker) who I've heard about from, oh a bunch of people, like Dan, Heather, and Derek.
] Crediting links and the idea of tracking a meme back to its source has been on my mind awhile (like since some snot left a message in my guestbook on the topic) - the ur link (ur-URL?) for me was actually the hibernating blip.com. which I found because I wanted blip.com for myself. From there I found Misterpants last may, and from there Andrew and the whole Pitas/Diaryland scene - Marychen being the first person who I read regularly (around December - I wasn't such an early adopter being on AOL 3.0/ 28k dialup).
] I've wonder a lot who Misterpants really *is* since like his about page is hardly Powazek-compliant. And then the other day I read this Message on Andy's mailing-list and now I'm even more intrigued. Look at Superbad, then look back at Misterpants. It all makes sense - the James Brown allusions on Misterpants's site, the choice of colors, the '70's design style. And why else would Misterpants site have been listed on a dropdown menu on blip.com w/ sites like redsmoke and jodi? And why isn't it on his links page? Hah, Pants - you couldn't cover your tracks forever. We know what you're up to now.
] So that's it. The whole Web is just me, seven teenagers, and a bunch of robots.
#This -was- one of my favorite journal-blog things - but it's been way over a month since it's been updated. I hope that Heather Anne is just too busy to be updating and this isn't because she's lost interest. The archives are still totally worth reading - go leave some footprints in her log and let her know you care. #
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Install ROM Extensions for Lowercase Type Display
] So I'm thinking that a month of this Apple II+ Pita might drive me insane so I gave myself (and you, my half-dozen faithful readers) the option of switching over to a more normal resizeable, mixed-case display setting. The dumb code that you can click here or lower on the page bounces you to another page and when you the link on that page (I wanted to use a META Refresh but it wasn't working - I might put in a Javascript redirect later) it links back to this page. A script in the head of this page tracks the referring url and if it's '...lowrcase.html' it loads a different stylesheet.] I should be shot for coming up with a script that dumb.
] Of course when I say 'I should be shot for coming up with a script that dumb' what I really mean is 'I'm so cool for writing something that smacks of so little effort.'
] Um anyway - that's all for tonight.
#--PORTAL--
--ME--
* music * stories * diary * contact * read guestbook * sign guestbook--PEOPLE--
* misterpants * marychen * bn2b * melty * samanthakramer * powazek * rebekah * riothero * girlhero * coygirl * robotgirly * kidroboto * robotfrank * loobylu * squishy * mars * kottke * ed * syntheticzero * nubbin * harrumph * moonothing--PITAS--
* dirtynedluv * apathy * simcoe * prolix * lopati * sn00t * harmfull * marmalade * darby--DIARYLANDERS--
* mop * proven * rayn * mimismartypants--MUSIC--
* lyon * penrose * bonk * oliveros * kalvos and damian--INPUT--
* mc sweeney's * first monday * suck * ubernu * onion * jerkcity--SEEK--
* altavista * google * open directory