Goths
Last Thursday I took my wife to see an industrial band she likes at a Goth club[1]. Having only had a few experiences with Goths over the years, I really can’t do anything but generalize. Also, because it was a concert I can’t really be sure who was “goth” and who just showed up in black clothes for the industrial acts. Just the same, I was surprised to see the extent to which emo and Japanese anime have penetrated the Goth subculture. The hairstyles that many of the Goth kids were wearing were defiantly straight out of animes, and a lot of the leather has been replaced by black skinny jeans. At the risk of sounding judgmental, I felt like these people could barely be called “Goth” at all. Well, they still all chainsmoked clove cigarettes[2], so that is still pretty gothy, and my clothes still reek from them of course. I don’t get it honestly, I think higher quality tobacco cigarettes actually smell good and cloved ones smell pretty nasty.
[1] Its actually a gay club six nights of the week, and a goth club one night. That means of all the people who were dressed “normal” (there because they were club staff) I was the least attractive. Thanks for ruining a sure thing skinny gay people.
[2] Clove cigarettes are actually much worse for you than tobacco. They make your lungs bleed.
My First Weeks at The Parish
I’m finding the actual performance of Church work to be rather rewarding. I started working in mid July, attending meeting, speaking at mass and working at the parish festival. I started officially on August 1st. I’ve been busy putting together the Parish’s CCD program and plotting some Youth Ministry stuff. I’ve also had some limited success in putting together CCD rooms in the school (the school closed last year so I have most of the building to myself). Mostly with CCD I’ve been trying to hunt down enough catechists and get everybody registered for classes. I’m still down by one, and am hoping something materializes soon. Youth Ministry wise I’ve got the first meeting planned and am hoping to do some light surveying this week and next week to get a better idea of when people are available. I’m wondering if my online initiatives have made communicating with people a bit too fractured. That certainly wasn’t something I foresaw, but the turnaround on the Facebook group has been a bit low. Otherwise I’ve got my first event set for the start of October.
Tsk, Tsk
When a noted liberal columnists says something I said like two weeks ago there are two items worth mentioning:
- I need to higher a good plagiarism lawyer.
- I’m pretty fricking smart.
Joking, of course. Jeez.
Questions the Internet Refuses to Answer
After like a thousand google searches I am unable to get locate the answers to the following questions:
1) I am unsure as to whether the wii fit plus uses the capabilities of the Motionplus controller, but it probably doesn’t. This is very unfortunate.
2) I cannot say with any certainty when ASUS will put forth the next iteration of their EEE line.
3) When to expect gecko adhesive or LED light bulbs.
On Book Readers
I, for one, am not impressed with the hype surrounding the Kindle. The display technology is so primitive (and expensive, the device is a huge loss leader for the books) and it grants Amazon a near monopoly over your reading assuming you only read their selected titles, not limited to Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion. With that said though, I’ve started to think that an eReader that was untangled from Amazon, had the ability to write custom apps and had some good touch/handwriting analysis software could be an amazing tool in the workplace. I don’t just mean for college textbooks, although that would be absolutely fantastic. First of all, this would be a compelling tool for lawyers and doctors, who could have access to their diagnosis manuals or court documents in a readable and efficient manner. The second use I could envision is a replacement to the projector or webinar software used so much today. Ideally, this would take the shape of everybody syncing up their reader with a “master” or “presentation” suite where the person heading up the meeting was able to broadcast to broadcast arbitrary documents and images to other people’s displays. Finally, coupled with a collaboration server it could finally kill off the shared network drive for good. That, in and of itself, would be worth it.
Defining The “Suburb”
One of the problems that I encounter with some regularity is how to classify an area outside of arbitrary borders. For example, I live inside Pittsburgh’s city limits, but my neighborhood is somewhat “suburban.” No big buildings, the roads aren’t congested, some areas are very much like strip malls. And yet I don’t think that Brookline is a suburb, in fact I don’t think that one borough over (Dormont) is that suburban at all. Then something occured to me, there are parts of Dormont and Brookline that require one to pay if they require to park and exit their life. This ends somewhere in Mt Lebanon and Castle Shannon. I realize that this definition is just as fraught with problems as any other system of classification, but here in the south hills it seems to work pretty well.
The Course of my Paleo-Romanticization
The Provost in Charelston South Carolina was mortored with a different substance than bricks are today. Sea shells were grounded down and heated, and the result are brick walls that, almost three hundred years later, have not needed to be restored or remortored. Similarly, I once spoke to someone knowledgeable about Native American life before the colonization of North America and he told me that, because they ate diets largely of rooted plants with only a little bit of meat, with little access to sugars, it wasn’t uncommon for members of the First Nations to live to be 80 years old. The reason I tell you this is because, like most people, I have this tendency to glorify the past. I realize this to be a one sided romanticization, but I also feel like it is one that is rather inescapable. For example, a few weeks ago I learned that because the frame of my house (built in the 40’s) is made of hardwood, it will stand practically forever, even as all the McMansions that have been built in the last twenty years start to display signs of age. I may have a tendency to glorify the way things used to be done, but the three facts I have given about the way things used to be, each with several centuries between them seem on the money. The idea that the past was better than things are now may be the easiest thing to romantisize because when we romanticize the past our conclusions are frequently correct.
My paleo-romanticism tends to be of the sort that I view older things as being more “in step” with “nature.” In lectures he has given, Slajov Zizek has rightly pointed out that attempts to construe “nature” as existing in an inherently harmonious, peaceful manner, are patently false. The process through which the tectonic plates of the Earth move, fossil fuels are formed or carnivorous animals sustain themselves are all violent, they all depend on breaking things. Yet I go on thinking about agrarianism (and urban farming) and organic foods or green living, or going to a back to the land/arts & crafts sort of life. All of these beliefs, when they are given an ethical or aesthetic defense, depend on this sort of poorly conceived construction of nature. I recognize these facts as such, and yet still have an affective belief that living in this sort of “more pure” relationship is the morally superior endeavor.
And yet, acknowledging that its romanticism for a past that never really existed, I wonder how else I’m to measure environmental behaviors that are wrong in and of themselves. Is mountaintop removal wrong beyond its human costs? What dignity does a local watershed have, beyond how humans view it? These are questions that seem to have answers. Answers I can’t give and still feel as though I’m being honest.
This is something that has been agitating me more and more recently, as I have been trying to understand how to get out from between nihilism and romanticism as competing postmodern situations. Something I have not been able to do with any success. I think the worst part of all this is that, beyond planting six or seven plants this year, I really have not pursued any these options in my own life. So not only do I believe in stuff I cannot link to any sort of truth about the world, I’m a hypocrite too…
Open On Start Tomboy Addin/Plugin
About a month ago I started using Tomboy note taking software. The program has been useful but I’ve been frustrated that it didn’t have a way to organize the notes themselves. Sure there are Notebooks, but you can’t sort stuff in the Notebooks themselves. I created a “Table of Contents” note, buy found myself frustrated that I had to remember to leave it open, or open it back up again whenever I was ready to shut down my computer or exit the program (Tomboy automatically opens notes that were visible at shutdown). This wouldn’t do for me, so I spent the better part of today writing the Open On Start Tomboy addin/plugin.
This plugin adds a checkbox item to the Tools menu that reads “Open On Start.” When the item is selected that Note will display everytime Tomboy starts.
Source Code is available here
The Addin maybe downloaded here
My Problems With Daybreak
When we talk about the last episode of Battlestar Galactica, we’d be best to cleave it into two parts. The battle at the colony and after they discover Earth. Neither part is very good, and they are even worse as a whole. But the battle sequence was just that, a battle sequence and not much else. It was more defined by how predictable it was than anything else. Boomer flops sides again, no major characters die and Lee gets back in a uniform (which I predicted). Other than this, my biggest problem is that we don’t get much of a space battle, which is an absolutely dreadful way to end a show about a warship. Rather, we saw things fly into the Galactica. We also assume that the Cylons were dealt a big blow, but the chances are that there are tens if not hundreds more baseships out there.
I will list my problems with the final episode in order of importance, omitting the ones I’ve already talked about:
- No explanation was given for Starbuck, she’s just a mystery
- She wasn’t the Harbringer of Death, so that suspense was pointless and achieved no payoff
- Adama decides to go off and be alone, this would be fine but among the people he never sees again is HIS OWN SON, HIS ONLY FAMILY IN EXISTENCE, THE SON HE HAD A BROKEN RELATIONSHIP WITH BUT THEY MANAGED TO PUT IT ASIDE AND FORGIVE EACH OTHER
- Come on, ancient prehistoric Earth? Really?
- The whole of humanity renounces technology for a simple pastoral life? NONE of them have problems with this? Or is dictator Adama forcing them like he forced everything else?
- The Colonials big plan is a failure, in the last scene we see our world, which is just as violent as everything else
- Galen also decides to be alone
- Anders flies the ships into the sun. Because everybody wants to be farmers, because not having the ships there worked out so well on New Caprica.
- The Cylons are still out there somewhere
- The Centurions are just going to fly off somewhere? What’s that going to achieve for them, maybe they would like to stay on Earth and help too?
