Absolutely Nothing To Do With Easter

– but I was just watching music videos on Rage*, and I had to share this with you:

(You have to promise to watch the entire thing, though. Or at least until you get to the part with the giant floating head of death.)

Also it's widescreen, so you might want to click through to embiggen.

UPDATE! The remarkable Geoff Klock has written a fine analysis of this very video, wherein he explains that you can interpret the whole thing as a kind of allegory for the music industry. Fantastic :)

*PS "hey Thoapsl, whatever happened to the Rage Roundup?" "yeah, um . . . I'll be getting back to it eventually, honest . . ." *excuses, etc*

YSTR!

FEAR IT

. . .

Or not, whatever.

A holiday is always a fine thing – enjoy a hot cross bun, if you like.

(Or, a cross hot bun? Hmm.)

Viva hols.

Two or Three Things for Tuesday

Hey look! Two recent points of interest, each one in the form of a pointedly interesting sequence of words. These aren't short articles, but if you've 15 minutes or so to spare then I totally recommend you check them out:

1. Spectacular true story (via Wired) of a genius Canadian thief. (Do those last three words go together often, or rarely?) It's another great story from Winnipeg – how aboot that?

2. Okay, this one may be a bit intimidating, but repeat after me RIGHT ON I AM A HEAVY THINKER, I EAT YOUR PHILOSOPHY FOR BREAKFAST AND THEN I SPIT IT BACK IN YOUR FACE and you'll be cool.* This article is a fascinating metaphysical argument for justifying the existence of reality, via a big simple idea that I've never seen before.

And yeah, I think the existence of reality is definitely a problem – as in, "why does it exist?". I've never before known an answer that didn't fall back to "just because it does, that's why", or "a wizard did it", or else some version of the anthropic principle. But while this article's argument is not without potential flaws, it's still very, very intriguing. And it also provides a really nifty angle on the old "like, what if we're all being simulated inside a giant computer, like the matrix, like – how could we tell? Like, dude, whoa" chestnut.

If you can stand to read the whole article, please tell me what you think!

*Philosophy is all about intellectual confidence, remember. Why do think Socrates drank that poison? CONFIDENCE.

Also! Bonus Point of Interest! (if you haven't seen it already):

Michael Buble, Stalked By A Velociraptor.

'night :)

Rule #1: Don't Go To Bed Hungry

I tell you what, I think those freaking Top 10 lists really took it out of me. Shortly after posting the final list, I succumbed to a mildly bizarre illness – a kind of feverish, throaty sleeping sickness – and it's taken me more than a week since then to move beyond "miserably ill" and back to mere "croaky ill-temper". What did I miss while I was out?

Lucky for you, wiser webfolk than I have been able to provide commentary on the world in my absence, of which I shall now reproduce a pertinent example:

No, wait – I think that happened before the last Top 10? Aw, whatevs. Let's just assume business as usual & no worries, then.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that you aren't reading this blog in order to receive commentary on current events. On the original hand – are you, actually? Should I be blogging more commentary on current events? Please let me know, if so . . .

Either way, more blogging soon. I've been collecting a fine swag of interesting images without any particular purpose, so I think I'm going to start posting the images without any particular purpose. Just to share, you know. The way all those fancy awesome tumblr kids are doing blog*, these days.

For example: this. I'm not sure where this came from, but apparently it's by someone called Michael Page, who would appear to be kind of awesome. (Click the image for a closer look, I think it's worth it.)

Nice and interesting, huh?

All right. And now: nachos.

Good night :)

*Yeah, "doing blog". That's what I wrote.

International Women's Day

is today, how about that.

I think I'd like to say something about it, but I'm not sure what. Feminism can be difficult to talk about (Gosh, really?). If you agree with me, then I'm (uselessly) preaching to the converted; but if you disagree, then our disagreements are probably fundamental and/or quite subtle (& so, either way, probably v difficult to discuss intelligently via interweb). And anyhow, why should you care what I think about it?

But this is my blog, so I'm going to do it anyway.

What I think "about women" – uh, politically speaking – has spiralled around in different directions as I've grown up, I think. As a kid of leftish-lowermiddleclassy parents, I internalised the status quo of 1980s-90s political correctness: there is sexism in the world, women are treated badly and unfairly, this is bad and unfair. But as a teenager it dawned on me that being male wasn't all steak and glory, either; there were unexpectedly bad aspects to being a man in the modern world, too. For example: pop culture seemed to be telling me that boys were foolish and troublesome and evil, most of the time. And I felt like I was being told that girls could do anything, but simultaneously that boys could not. When you're adolescent, any potential unfairness (towards yourself) is a red rag, so this apparent "stupid boys will be stupid boys" meme bugged me a lot. Were girls now getting the best of everything, and always the benefit of the doubt? Had feminism "gone too far in the other direction"?

No. No, it hadn't, and I feel kind of stupid now for even considering sentiments like that. But it took me a few more years to see the world clearly from a few more sides, other than my own. And I had been privileged to grow up in an environment where sexism against women was sometimes less than obvious, I think; maybe that was why it took me a while to see and understand all the things that other people were thinking, the ways that they were acting, the ways in which they were being affected. Actions and consequences, assumptions and beliefs – these aren't always obvious. (Obviously.)

This is what I assume and believe, now: that the similarities across gender are nowhere near as significant as the differences between individuals. I've never known a woman who was more of a woman than a person. But I know most people don't agree with me, they don't believe this; instead, most people think that there are a bunch of crucial, essential commonalities to men and to women, and that these gender-commonalities are more significant than anything else. And to me that's the essential problem of sexism, because I believe that gender is not actually as significant as we make it – or at least, it doesn't have to be. Sexism, like racism, is bad because it's essentially untrue.

So our status quo is messed up, I think. And everyone in our society is disadvantaged by the false assumptions of sexism – that's what I was confused to learn as a young teen, that men (i.e. me) were sometimes being disadvantaged too. But that's not to say that men have it worse overall, because they don't. You can't see the world honestly without seeing that it still disadvantages women far worse than men, I think. (There are so many examples, I'm not even going to get into them; not today, anyhow.)

So. To me, this is International Women's Day: it's a reminder that things are still bad. (Though thankfully much, much better now than they ever used to be; & people sometimes underestimate just how much better, I think.) There are still a whole bunch of big fat sexist problems, all over the place. It makes me feel like I'm always needing to think hard and pay attention and act bravely and behave well, to do my part to make things better. Be fair. Don't be a dick.

International Women's Day: Don't Forget.

So that's what it means to me and what I think about it, I guess.

But, ah, what a serious and humourless post! (Not to mention, possibly patronising, stupid, facile, self-indulgent, myopic, wrong? I don't even know . . . but please tell me in the comments.)

Sorry, folks. To cheer us up, here's a picture of a pony:

Right on.

Up!

Go! Presence! Action! Now!

I finally have internet access again. This is a fine and helpful thing. While absent from the internet these past weeks, I missed all sorts of interesting things. For example:

1. SHOCK! Sparkly vampire star Robert Pattinson really hates vaginas! TRUE! SHOCK!

2: Tina Fey made the cover of Vogue! People are annoyed because Vogue photoshopped her scar away, but even so – Happy Anna Howard Shaw Day!

3. Young George Clooney.

Hmm. I'm going to need some time to process all this, I think.

2KX

* something missing *

THE XMAS IS COMING

No more than a fortnight to go, at the most. The Santa clearly has the upper hand.

I'm quite looking forward to the Xmas, this year. I'm not religious* (you could probably tell from the awesome Todd Schorr image I've posted above), but I much appreciate the nostalgia of midsummer turkey & family & feasting & gift-giving. And the X-holiday relaxation, especially: it's several days during which I don't have to do anything that isn't X-related. Freedom to loll (& lol) on a couch almost all day, freedom to feast, freedom to ignore work. Fantastic.

Even better – the gifts I've bought are already wrapped, a funky little stack in the corner of my room. How the hecks did I get my presents all sorted out so early, this year? I have no idea. It's very unlike me. I like it.

So! Two weeks until Xmas. Three weeks until 2010. More on events as they develop.

Good luck.

*So I figure the 'X' in my personal 'X-mas' simply stands for something other than 'Xrist'? (Or technically that would be 'XPIΣTΌΣ', for all you scholars of Ancient Greek and/or Theology in the audience . . . I know you're out there . . .)

Email: Obsolete?

By now we're all familiar with the imminent death of newspapers, the imminent death of CDs, the imminent death of television, etc. But the other day I came across an idea that I'd never considered: the imminent death of email. That got my attention.

Email went mainstream only fifteen years ago, but it's now an essential part of daily life; to imagine it being completely replaced (already?!) is bizarre. But this article has almost convinced me that email's days really are numbered; the writer has some interesting arguments, at least . . .

To begin with, email is apparently too slow for the modern internet, because it's not instantaneous. Email is stuck in the 1990s – deep down, it's still expecting you to be on dialup:

. . . email was better suited to the way we used to use the Internet—logging on and off, checking our messages in bursts. Now, we are always connected . . .

And that's why, according to the article, email is steadily being superseded by various kinds of instant messaging and chat (not to mention Twitter and Facebook). The last time you wanted to tell somebody something over the internet, did you actually use your email? Or did you just update your Facebook status?

The other big problem is email's lack of finesse. We're all dealing with more information than we actually have time to read, so we need good ways to classify and sort everything – #hashtags and meta-data, blog labels, threads. Email doesn't really allow for that. Also, we now have various personal profiles associated with our presence on the net – extra information and context about ourselves, which is a kind of "passive" communication – and email doesn't really allow for that, either.

This is why, for example, Google are setting up their Wave: a new system that's supposed to combine the functionalities of email, instant messages, social networking and collaborative documents (a.k.a. wikis) into one supreme package. When I first heard about the Google Wave I was sceptical (and also slightly . . . concerned), but the more I think about it, the more useful (and plausible) it all seems.

Is this really going to happen? Will email be completely abandoned within our lifetimes? Is it going to matter, either way?

Also: should we be worried that Google knows everything about us and is building artificially intelligent supercomputers?

Image © 2002, C2 and its related entities. Via Google Image Search ;)

MICHAEL JACKSON IS UNDEAD