neonascent

Here is some late night writing I’ve done. It is a quick reinterpretation of parts of my “thoughts.txt” desktop file. Also, it’s a counter to the sorts of things Hayden has been writing in his blog lately. I’m sorry about the format, but I wrote it with this font, and I feel without it the writing is unjustifiably flowery.

Please feel more than welcome to comment, as I need it. Of course I really need to write more and get through all the chaff that goes through my mind and onto paper (read: computer screen).

. . .

There is a fantastic short story over at monochrom based on H.P.Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and inspired by Goatse. Here is a snip:

The many data networks, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

…It makes me gleefully happy. Monochrom describes itself as a art-technology-philosophy group, and though I haven’t yet given it the time it seems to deserve, a cursory look at their site suggests it’s totally rockin’. My kind of people, especially since I am a self-styled art-technology-philosophy person myself!

>> Link

I ran across an insightful and humourous explanation of the mechanism behind corporate customer care services:

…The monkey has two buttons in front of him. One is red, and one is green. The red button is very small and, when pressed, redirects the e-mail to someone higher up - say, the janitor. The green button is huge and, when pressed, sends a form letter to the sender and promptly deletes the e-mail… and then a banana drops out of a chute and a small electrode in the monkey’s brain gives him an orgasm.

The quote is taken from The Independant Gaming Source, which is a nice blog of interesting activity in the indie games scene. It’s worth a look if you’re after refreshingly creative games, most of which are at least as high gameplay and production standard as mainstream.

Also worth a look is the Freeware Top 40 - a great site to find distractions for all your procrastination needs, and all completely free! I’d give very solid testimony to the simple genius of Spirit Engine, to be found at Natomic Studios.

Note that the image accompanying this entry is for illustration only. The original can be found at http://marcoe.net/Cheeky-Monkey.jpg

What shits me (a phrase taken from my wonderful housemate Hayden), is that people use the word “random” when they mean “indiscriminate”. This may be me becoming a grumpy old man…

It boggles my mind to see that some seminal feminist theory comes out of Freud’s phallocentric psychoanalysis. I don’t think I could have imagined anything more anathema to feminism than the essentialist concept of penis envy.

One feminist theorist - Joan Riviere in her essay Womanliness as Masquerade implies that intellectual ability is innately masculine. At the same time as holding the Freud’s gender essentialism, she suggests that “masculine” women must masquerade womanliness. I’m not sure how masculinity can be determined by having a penis at the same time as femininity is performed.

The reader may now ask how I define womanliness or where I draw the line between genuine womanliness and the ‘masquerade’. My suggestion is not, however, that there is any such difference; whether radical or superficial. they are the same thing. The capacity for womanliness was there in this woman ? and one might even say it exists in the most completely homosexual woman … (Joan Riviere, WOMANLINESS AS A MASQUERADE, p38)

Wow.