cool the irs is not into me paying them in installments so i guess that whole benignkingdom check is going to them
awesome!
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instead of “i like all music except rap and country” why not say “i hate music by poor people”
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i was proud of this comment i wrote on a fandom secrets post, deal with it
Obviously ASOIAF is not history. But the whole setting is only significant by its relationship to history: by dismantling romantic ideas of medieval Europe by showing a setting that is closer to the brutality of actual medieval Europe. Magic and dragons are there as story elements, yeah, but that doesn’t mean GRRM owes it to anyone to make a setting WITHOUT rape and brutality, if that doesn’t serve the story he’s trying to tell.
Conveying a setting or character that is evil and despicable doesn’t mean the author condones it. See also: EVERY WORK OF FICTION EVER.
oh I’ve answered the “are video games art” question:
If you can justifiably go to the fucking Better Business Bureau if you are unhappy with how the narrative of the game is structured, the game is a product, not an artwork. If your critiques of the narrative extend into the realm of feeling entitled to amendments to the game’s story, you are not viewing it as an artwork.
If instead you do NOT revoke your implication as a player/viewer to TRUST the makers of the game, and at least to respect all of their narrative decisions, even if you hate some of them, you are viewing it as art.
I have been thinking a lot about what makes entertainment and what makes art. They’re just words, and it’s a fallacy to think that they refer to concrete, external things when their meanings are changed by their every use. But they represent certain ideals that I do not see as mutually exclusive. Oversimplified, art is honesty, and entertainment is fun. Sometimes the one sees itself as the other when it isn’t. Sometimes they are the same.
going to try to tighten this up into something that makes more sense and relates directly to me3 for the Real Blog
“…print both reinforces and transforms the effects of writing on thought and expression. Since the shift from oral to written speech is essentially a shift from sound to visual space, here the effects of print on the use of visual space can be the central, though not the only, focus of attention. This focus brings out not only the relationship between print and writing, but also the relationship of print to the orality still residual in writing and early print culture. ” p 113
“By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in acive human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.” p. 129
from Orality and Literacy, Ong
as I transcribe this stuff, it makes it easier to read it aloud to myself, which is itself interesting…
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“made an origami bag out of a page of a fashion mag for a gift. filled it with glitter, stones & paper clips. covered the outside in stars.”
jesus shit it’s like somebody is running a twitter as a tone-perfect caricature of the person she was at age 16
was worried she was vanished or in trouble but she’s not. was worried she hadn’t learned by now how not to be self-obsessed and manipulative and she hasn’t! i hope she finds somebody suitable who will be cowed into spending the rest of his/her life with her by threats of self-harm and suicide.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_uploading
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Conrad and I were talking about computers and putting brains in computers!
A ubiquitous idea in scifi and thinking about transhumanism is the idea of uploading oneself into some artificial medium. Like, theoretically a computer will at some point be able to model a human brain perfectly, and at that point it would be possible to upload your brain into it and then you can be in a computer-body or whatever and live forever! How cool!
And the sticking point for me, which I have hardly ever seen articulated anywhere, is that of EGO or POINT OF VIEW, or… It’s such a fundamental concept, of necessity, that it’s invisible: the notion that I am not I because of what my brain is, but because I am the one looking out of it. This is not some abstract mystical notion of “soul;” I think that is basically a meaningless concept. I’m talking about the actual mechanical fact that I am my own experience of the world, and I am having that experience through the physical medium that is my body and brain.
So if one can “transfer” one’s brain perfectly into some hardware, or into an artificial body or whatever—effectively if one can simultaneously REMOVE or kill the brain in the original body, and bring to life the same brain in an artificial body— there’s no reason to believe that POINT OF VIEW would transfer. The original person would be dead; the continuity of their experience that is their identity would end. The artificial copy would theoretically be having a contiguous experience, and would believe that it had been “transferred,” because it would remember its experience pre-transfer.
So it’s easy to imagine a world in which this is commonplace, and in which the idea that people undertaking these transfers are effectively committing suicide so that an immortal version of themselves can take their place is ignored. And because there’s no way to prove or even clearly articulate the fact that one person’s stream-of-consciousness would END and the copy’s stream would believe it was a direct continuation from the original’s (and on the outside, in any meaningful way it WOULD BE, except for the fact that the original person is now dead), it would probably be commonplace also to believe that a true transfer takes place, and that there is no loss of life going on. So the human population is killing itself, and the artificial-human population remembers those human lives as if they were its own.
anyway
Ong on “The Interiority of Sound” as fundamental to the paradigm-shift that the switch from oral to literate culture represents.
“Sight isolates, sound incorporates. Whereas sight situates the observer outside what he views, at a distance, sound pours into the hearer…. Vision comes to a human being from one direction at a time…. When I hear, however, I gather sound simultaneously from every direction at once: I am at the center of my auditory world, which envelops me, establishing me at a kind of core of sensation and existence…. By contrast with vision, the dissecting sense, sound is thus a unifying sense. A typical visual ideal is clarity and distinctness…. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.” 71. but a visual correlate of harmony is an ideal in visual art, too…
“In a primary oral culture… the phenomenology of sound enters deeply into human beings’ feel for existence, as processed by the spoken word. For the way in which the word is experienced is always momentous in psychic life. The centering action of sound… affects man’s sense of the cosmos. For oral cultures, the cosmos is an ongoing event with man at its center. Man is the umbilicus mundi…. Only after print and the extensive experience with maps that print implemented would human beings, when they thought about the cosmos or universe or ‘world’, think primarily of something laid out before their eyes…. The ancient oral world knew few ‘explorers’” 72
Orality and Literacy, Walter J Ong
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exgirlfriend who has been mysteriously completely invisible on the internet for a long time has a new portfolio site up and
“I’m currently working on my senior thesis in planning the best practices of promoting web comics through social media, as well as developing my commercial media and public relations skills.”
what what what. i am interested in how this will play out
this tumblr is in no way connected to my real name right
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Old lady says to two cops on the corner: One of yall is tall and one is short, like me.
The short cop says: I’m cuter, though.
The old lady says: BOTH of yall are handsome!!
And they are all very amused by this
I LOVE IT
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