Below are the 8 most recent journal entries recorded in any old mancy will do's LiveJournal:

Friday, August 6th, 2004
2:47 pm	Dear readers: I no longer need this journal. it was started for a purpose I now find unnecessary. So I am turning it into a repository for my thoughts and non-thoughts regarding a hobby of mine, the MUD called aardwolf. it will be filled only with geekery from now on. All of you whom I have friended (whom I enjoy very much) are invited to join me at my regularly scheduled journal, oatmeal Thanks. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 5th, 2004
3:26 am	mob portals scarred lands: bronze dragon faerie tales: Doc (maybe other dwarves, too) star wars: ewok locate animal in conjunction with trans-plant is wonderful. try large gardener in Dark Elf Stronghold. Best to gate to mobs far into the level, past as many locks and doors as possible. I recently rebuilt, from Diva to lizardman. I used to swear by Diva. Anierin, of course, is based on Aneirin, who I played years ago as a Diva Ranger back in V1. but I like this build alot. Divas have a +1 to wisdom, and that's rough for rangers. with lizard, I've turned that to a -1, but lost my -1 to con and luck. when I rebuilt, I added no stats at all to luck or dex; just piled everything into con, wis, str, and int. it works quite nicely. and once I got up to the levels where tame and wolf spirits were available, I didn't notice that I lost tame and align detect from the Diva side. also ditched some vulns (lizards have none) and gained envenom. which is only vaguely useful, since many clan and all aard weapons can't be venomed... but it might help naked cr-ing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
12:56 pm	In Tibetan Buddhism's "Four Dignities of the Warrior's Path," courage and ferocity are absent. In fact, the qualities regarded as essential have nothing in common with the training regimens of football players or Marines or lobbyists. The first dignity is literally translated in English as meekness, but that word doesn't convey its full meaning. "Relaxed confidence" is a more precise formulation. A humble feeling of being at home in one's body. Perkiness, or hard-earned, unabashed joy, is the second dignity. To develop it, the warrior diligently drives out the self-indulgence of cynicism. The third is outrageousness. It combines a delight in daring experiments with a passionate objectivity that is free of both hope and fear. The fourth dignity is inscrutability, which demands a supple willingness to be unpredictable in carrying out one's moral vision. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 10th, 2004
12:01 pm	not a pure egotist: an excerpt "Do you like Melissa Etheridge, Edie Brickell and the new Bohemians, Bonne Raitt and gay dance music?" "No, no, no, and double no!" I'm proud of myself for standing my ground but this will pass. "Are you willing to tolerate the aforementioned music if she's very good at oral sex?" "Uhhhh…" He's got me. "Yeah, sure," I admit. from She Hates my Futon (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2004
12:59 pm	cute, and sometimes interesting. 1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone. 2. It's always darkest before dawn. So if you're going to steal your neighbor's newspaper, that's the time to do it. 3. Sex is like air. It's not important unless you aren't getting any. 4. Don't be irreplaceable. If you can't be replaced, you can't be promoted. 5. It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. 6. It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. 7. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you're a mile away and you have their shoes. 8. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat & drink beer all day. 9. If you lend someone $20, and never see that person again, it was probably worth it. 10. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. 11. If you drink, don't park; accidents cause people. 12. Some days you are the bug, some days you are the windshield. 13. Don't worry, it only seems kinky the first time. 14. Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment. 15. Generally speaking, you aren't learning much when your mouth is moving. 16. Experience is something you don't get until just after you need it. 17. Never miss a good chance to shut up. 18. We are born naked, wet, and hungry. Then things get worse. 19. The most powerful force in the universe is gossip. 20. You should not confuse your career with your life. 21. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance. 22. There is a very fine line between "hobby" and "mental illness." 23. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person. 24. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously. 25. People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them. 26. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy. Current Mood: apathetic (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 4th, 2004
1:44 pm	Miriam Greenberg -- I still love you. the textual diversity..archeology of typography in its most self-driven, radical form... status quo & the textual revolution. .... & cultural flux............ begin here (1) 7061 There is a great difference between the effect of a script which one can read easily and fluently, and one which one can write but not easily decipher. You lock your thoughts in it as in a casket. (Ludwig Wittgenstein) 0844 Creative individuals or worker bees? The aim is to reconcile typographic craft with cultural ambition. (Emily King) The evolution of the printed word has now fallen into graphic ruin, by which we mean of course, that text, like the wolf, has eaten Red Ridinghood's grandmother, dentures and oatmeal all in one gulp. Ovid mentions, writes of this, centuries before his time, "in such a way does his artifice conceal his art”—ars adeo latet arte sua. (line 252, Pygmalion) –-and herein it looses itself from traditional grasp and loses all metaphor. text blocks that run into the gutter; words a reversed out of columns of type, obliterating the text; words that shoot off the edge of the text area and continue mid-letter on the next line; overlapping messages that merge in dense overlays with photos and drawings; a giant Helvetica sentence that rolls on like a juggernaut for nineteen pages; a duplicated passage cancelled with the instruction "VOID THIS PAGE." This is more than just a housing space for words--literally they come alive, move about the page of their own volition. And with magnifying glass in hand, the potentiality of human life reaching either the threshold of obsolescence (planned?), or a far-more-than-symbolic fin de siecle of literature, text, and typography, is an overwhelming gorge. For words, sentences, paragraphs,.. indeed, whole novels are no longer a concerto belying the continual "human condition," far be it from that--the intuitive revolution (anti-establishment by virtue) has ended, the victors: former typographical error The textual (sexual?) manipulation and mutation is now inseparable, inexplicable, inextricable from written content. and the process results in organic harmony, much like Wilhelm Reich envisioned with the orgone accumulator, or ancient Peruvians with their magical-spiritual methods of trepanning. * * * With New Zealand’s provision of human rights for apes in 1997, many once- reluctant Western governments followed in their wake, embarking on a crusade geared towards recognizing a more whole and inclusive definition of life. Methods of communication between humans and an overwhelming amount of chordates (animals with dorsal nerve chords) were discovered, and in the following decades, perfected. W ith growing awareness of cultural and social environments and personal perception, memeology was introduced to the global scientific community, and soon became a widely studied field. 20th century memeologist Richard Dawkins provides a simple yet accurate explanation of early meme theory in his book, The Selfish Gene: “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” Upon later inspection, the current and widely held cultural opinion of memes, or viral ideas: “… memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind, you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.” With the widespread acceptance of meme theory, significance of text was realized. From that grew awareness of textuality. Tex•tu•al•i•ty //tékstchooálitee// v. 1. intr. Of or relating to text. 2. intr. Relating to the interactions between text and other text or organic beings. Thus we arrive at our present state………. * * * I live on Earth at present, and I don't know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing -- a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process -- an integral function of Universe. (Buckminster Fuller) (2) Howard Wells, a former Harvard professor of architectural theory, notes "...some spreads unfold to nearly two meters wide when fully extended. [The book] requires new routines from readers, who are lead (or coerced) into alternative spatial and physical relationships with the page. The textual space of the book is also reconceived." We reconvene some sixty pages later, in a location in the Arizona desert, where a shanty town is being constructed by moonlight, a perhaps coincidental sixty miles outside of the city limits of Phoenix (legendary bird made immortal by an undiscovered Indian ritual; once believed to have had hand in the creation of an expanding universe. This theory is now discredited, largely due to downplay by the Western media). Language moves between us and the world on patterns of repetition and variation, and a mimetic example of this might be something like an alphabet. (Paul Elliman) The issue at hand, not the shanty town, but its inhabitants. They are a group of ex computer programmers, scientists, and culture jammers from the once-thriving meccas of America's West Coast. Paul Weiss, once a twinkie-eating coder for Netscape in the late 1990s and early into the new millenium, comments: after being introduced to the power wielded by language--no, by text, by the characters themselves, I cannot, for example, look at a single line of code. Are the rules of today solely to conserve [human] personality in a society already tending towards inexperience and interdependence? L ike Weiss, many others from affluent West Coast spheres have chosen to donate a portion of their thought processes to the cultural resurrection of a textual paradigm. Often revoking all worldly goods, many have embarked on a program of spiritual meditation, which, with practice, will enable them to partition thought processes. This will subsequently allow a devotion of "mind-space" to conscious and sub-conscious grid-work and analysis of textual well-being. Kim Jaspersen, a former co-leader of the controversial internet-based Seti @ Home, the disputed discoverer of intelligent systems in the Hendyadic galaxy, remarks, "significant art--that which (3) most challenges has always been a cleavage into and a rupture of the visual status quo of any given generation. art, in so far as stylistic refinement is concerned, is always pro-establishment and harmony oriented. Some dissention is noted, however, especially among high-ranking government officials. A right-wing religious leader who asked to remain anonymous remarked that all was well when the bible was the bible, not a socially and textually autonomous being. However this opinion is no longer widely or openly held, and generates esteem of the nature that so-called creation science did in the late twentieth century… Once sought out only as esoterica and a subcultural curiosity, now the widely-held philosophy of textuality-as-truth has given allowance within the human mind to a jigsaw of paradigmatic revolution. the end result is thus: no culture that cultivates indeterminacy to this degree could textually be referred to as a masterpiece, but [it is] certainly a landmark in the synthesis of critical commentary and design... (AP Wire) Further: ? Eye 32, Vol. 8, (The International Review of Graphic Design) ? Visionary Cities: The Arcology of Paolo Soleri, Donald Wall ? The Mortal Indifference, Siril Ayer ? Socio-Textual Interlude, E. Cortezar ? Re:visioning Memetics, Italo Calvino ? The Meme’s Role in Western Cultural Evolution, Joseph Farrador ? Architecture, a Semiotext(e) compendium of textual ? The Codex Seraphinianus, Luigi Serafini ps …each letter is motivated, the Book is an infinite network traversed by Meaning; the Spirit merges with the Letter; the Secret (Knowledge, Wisdom) is a hidden letter, an unspoken word: the Book is a cryptogram whose code is the Alphabet. (Georges Perec, author of the 300 page lipogrammatic novel La Disparition, which does not contain the letter e.) (Comment on this)
Friday, January 16th, 2004
3:43 am	Happy Birthday Steph, where-ever you are "everyone you meet in portland seems to be a designer or a techie." It's my daily lament as I'm trying to find work. The vast majority of the people I know are involved in small start-ups or freelance work dealing with design, technology, or an intersection of the two. Of the top of my head, some of my closest associates are 2 web designers, a freelance writer, a freelance editor, a freelance database-code guru, and my roommate, who is trying to start her own tech support and networking business. for better or worse, technology and graphic design are integral parts of the Portland Experience. That goes triple for you if you're between the ages of 18 and, say, 35. The technology aspect is readily understandable. The west coast has a reputation as the frontier-lab in the technological revolution that our culture is currently undergoing. computers and their processes are new, big, shiny, filled with potential. Part of the design boom is tied into that. Everyone who's ever put together their own web page gets a thrill the first time they see their handiwork on the internet; you, too, can make media. that's wonderful, and there are some incredibly talented designers out there, I'm sure, who might never have gotten into the field if they hadn't started out in the early 90s as a computer geek. On the other hand, of course, there are some absolutely tacky people who call themselves designers because they learned href and img src and (god forbid) HR. We shoot these people when we find them, but they're starting to learn how to hide. But the purpose of this rant is not to bag on bad designers. there are plenty of web-sites out there that will do that for us, and natural selection works, too... bad designers usually end up without much work. not always, but usually. What I want to explore here is this: What is the real draw of design? why do so many people get enamored with it? Sure, it's art. But it's not really high art. There's a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip that I wish I could reprint here, but the gist is this: "A painting: high art... a comic strip: low art. A painting of a comic strip: reflective, commentary -- high art. A comic strip of a painting: juvenile, low art." If anything, then, design is the medium art. (HAH! pun. medium. get it?) right now, then. 500 words on what design means to you. Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 11th, 2004
10:18 am	relic from the hard drive; an appropriate beginning Myths drive and inform culture. It could be argued that the search that people are on throughout there entire lives are searches for either a definition of "myth," or the myths which properly inform and complete their cultural paradigm. So this will be a story about myths; about those I perceive around me, about those I recognize as myths, about my scratching at the conditioning to hunt for the myths, and for a proper definition of the word "myth". For a definition of the word, one could simply open a dictionary and read the following (if one were to open a Merriam-Webster's Deluxe Tenth Collegiate edition dictionary, at least) 1 a : a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon b: parable, allegory 2 a : a popular belief or tradition that has groun up around something or someone; especially on e embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society. b: an unfounded or false notion. for an in depth explanation, leading to a clearer personal definition, one might read the works of Sir Joseph Campbell. To form a truly personal understanding of the idea "myth," and thus an increased understanding of one's own place in the world, one must come up with their own personal mythology, and thus, without knowing it, their own personal definition of the word "myth". At some point in most people's lives, they have the idea that nothing exists; that their mind is merely playing tricks on them; only pure sensory perception is REAL (of course this doesn't affect behavior, because people still percieve a world; but I do not really wish to open this can of worms). At some point, everyone has to decide where he will base his reality. Enter myth. A story used to explain the things we see. A reflection of the truth which we sense. A true, if non-factual, fiction. (Comment on this)