Browse / Chat / TV

Browse / Chat / TV

July 22, 2006, 4:33 am
Filed under: Blogroll, Journal

Ands another week comes to a close

1545hrs
drstrangemoves: streamyx or gsm… outdoor in KL

1640hrs
“Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation’s laws.” S.J. Perelman (1904-1979)

1650hrs
[The Patriot is on TV]

“Ah, it’s Mel Gibson. He was William Wallace, and now he’s a Yankee.”
“Yeah, he was Jesus Christ one time too.”

[a conversation on the American War of Independence ensues…]

“Yeah! yeah! … and Monica Belucci was Mary Magdalene. That’s one hot momma.”

1710hrs

Or maybe we stopped talking about the Future around the time that, with its microchips and its twenty-four-hour news cycles, it arrived. Some days when you pick up the newspaper it seems to have been co-written by J. G. Ballard, Isaac Asimov, and Philip K. Dick. Human sexual reproduction without male genetic material, digital viruses, identity theft, robot firefighters and minesweepers, weather control, pharmaceutical mood engineering, rapid species extinction, US Presidents controlled by little boxes mounted between their shoulder blades, air-conditioned empires in the Arabian desert, transnational corporatocracy, reality television—some days it feels as if the imagined future of the mid-twentieth century was a kind of checklist, one from which we have been too busy ticking off items to bother with extending it. Meanwhile, the dwindling number of items remaining on that list—interplanetary colonization, sentient computers, quasi-immortality of consciousness through brain-download or transplant, a global government (fascist or enlightened)—have been represented and re-represented so many hundreds of times in films, novels and on television that they have come to seem, paradoxically, already attained, already known, lived with, and left behind. Past, in other words.

Michael Chabon, The Omega Glory

(And some might say Douglas Adams invented the computer. Where does he fit in?)

1720hrs

Since so much of our experience is mediated in some way or another, we have deep sensitivities to the signatures of different media. Artists play with these sensitivities, digesting the new and shifting the old. In the end, the characteristic forms of a tool’s or medium’s distortion, of its weakness and limitations, become sources of emotional meaning and intimacy.

Although designers continue to dream of “transparency” – technologies that just do their job without making their presence felt – both creators and audiences actually like technologies with “personality.” A personality is something with which you can have a relationship. Which is why people return to pencils, violins, and the same three guitar chords.

Brian Eno, The Revenge on the Intuitive

(Brian Eno, my hero)

1725hrs
drstrangemoves: no worries
floyd: aku nak discuss ngan hang pasal opportunity MSC tu
drstrangemoves: true
drstrangemoves: have to
drstrangemoves: not a lot of time left
drstrangemoves: aku dah overdose with information
floyd: patutlah hang dok meracau
floyd: leaking kot ..
floyd: jomlah kena kopi
floyd: best hujan2 ni

raving. leaking. and hot coffee best in the rain)

1735hrs…
A feature on newspapers on Discovery Channel — “Woah! Cool robotics!” — … (lapses into distraction)

1750hrs
(Musing on balud in Shanghai)

1800hrs
Off for coffee.

1801hrs
This just in: competition at Evil Editor: take a stab of writing a summary of one of these three books:

• The Da Vinci Code
• The Catcher in the Rye
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Criteria: creativity and humour. I’m gonna keep an eye on whoever does Hitchhiker — you’d have to be very brave, or starking mad. I’ll pass.

1815hrs
Off for coffee
… and the Pussycat Calls are dolling, might it become a happier weekend? (Happy Weekend)

eh?

2020hrs
if
//this (doesn’t work out
then)
else
where next?

How do you pass seasons in the tropics? Everyday is the same. 42 years of rain or shine.

Coffee delayed. Raving mad.

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