ideometric

The thing I love about teaching in Korea is that a good number of English teachers here are using the opportunity, time, and extra cash to pursue their creative interests on the side. It can be an inspiring environment.

I’ve always thought that learning an instrument would be too hard, but I finally decided to go for it and bought an acoustic guitar yesterday. It turns out that it is actually kinda hard, hahah. But it’ll be fun. Those callouses everyone talks about… I get it now, I can’t feel the tips of my fingers.

I propose a new internet acronym:

twwt – talk when we talk.

It’s got a different nuance than ttys (talk to you soon), or ttyl (talk to you later). It suggests both a resignation to or acceptance of the passage of time, which may be unavoidable. It has a hint of drama. It’s got a cool nonchalance, like when old dudes in movies say “I’ll see you when I see you.” It’s almost like “We’ll meet again.”

It suggests that whatever is keeping two parties apart must be of some significant import. There’s some fatalism in it, that “we will talk” is inevitable, even if when and where may be unknown. So, it implies a surety of bond despite the uncertainty of life’s twists and turns.

Plus it’s all symmetrical and stuff, and if you try to pronounce it it sounds funny. Try it.

http://lovelypackage.com

Good blog focused on package design. Lots of cool ideas & inspiration. And they helpfully identify the fonts used.

I never understand people who claim liberal bias in the media. The picture is obviously more complicated than that, with various motivating factors influencing what stories are covered and how.

This is during the news cycle when the stimulus was being covered.

Source: Yglesias / Thinkprogress

A modified technique for using a French Press / Press pot.  Good idea, gonna have to try it out. Cleaning a french press after using it is the worst part, and this seems like it’d make it easier. Not sure exactly how it’ll affect the flavor in the cup.

I want to experiment with the possibility of offering individually pressed cups of coffee, rather than drip coffee at the cafe I’m volunteering at here in Korea. Hand-drip is pretty popular at a lot of places, probably because it’s been big in Japan for a while (they go nuts about technique and the kind of water pot you should use, although I’m not sure how much difference it makes). But I haven’t seen French press offered anywhere.

Are better. Don’t you want to buy this car after watching this? I also love how it’s referred to as “the new small Chrysler.” Funny how perceptions change over time.

The music is also pretty slick, it’s the Adagio from the Concerto de Aranjuez, which was also featured in Ghost in the Shell II.

Here’re some more photos from wandering around alleyways in Seoul. Whenever I start taking pictures of a wall or texture, everyone walking by suddenly gets real curious why the foreigner is so interested in some crusty poster hahah. That’s kind of the point, though.

These were mostly taken around Kungook university (건대).

Enjoy the beauty in the mundane, find the art in the everyday :] for fun I think I’m gonna self-publish a little book of photos, using Lulu or something similar.

Sorry if it’s a bit morbid, but I was just thinking… What happens to your Facebook or Myspace or other virtual presence after you die? (Or whichever networking site may be popular in the future…). Does it become a de facto memorial to you? Does it take on a life of its own, a repository of memories and past conversations to be revisited and added to by friends leaving last wishes or addressing messages to you long after, much as you might address a grave site symbolically? Something that provides comfort to others?

Is there anything that should be, or can be, designed into a site for that? Is a deceased person’s e-presence a bug or a feature in an online community/social network?

Going off on a tangent spurred by the persistence of our virtual silhouettes…

Imagine some future anthropologist sifting through old servers of myspace pages or facebook profiles and analyzing the recorded conversations of bygone eras and individuals…

Imagine looking back on the history of our generation’s recorded personalities and relationships and general lack of privacy. Without a doubt future presidents and leaders and historical figures will have errant blog posts, forum discussions,  comments and photos, etc. More data, and I guess transparency, than any time previous.

Maybe 20 or 30 years from now, it could be common to have old AIM logs and other things dug up during elections (let alone the current practice of employers googling you and checking your Facebook profile). If you have any ambitions, maybe it’s a good idea to watch what you say online

I’m reading a short commentary by Alain Touraine in New Perspective Quarterly Fall 1998, trying to explore more of his work before getting back to work on my thesis…This excerpt is interesting to me.

The transformation of industrial culture has been underway for some time. The glimmerings of cultural change were first seen in the student and countercultural revolts of the 1960s, when marginal actors expressed their disenchantment with industrial culture. In the wake of those revolts, misgivings set in about the logic of the entire system–the Club of Rome proclaimed the era of limits and ecological concerns touched the mainstream.

The second stage of this transformation set in as prime actors of the industrial culture, such as the labor unions, began to disappear from center stage as the main opposition force. As had happened in earlier times, when the conflict between citizen and prince became institutionalized in constitutions and parliaments, the social rights of workers were institutionalized in the social-welfare state and mainstream political parties. Their struggle became hollow, bureaucratic and ritualized.

In the West during the 1970s, a sense of emptiness and malaise set in. Without the familiar actors, it was difficult to find meaning in that which had lost its unity. A period of complete doubt and cynicism arose. We didn’t know where we wereheaded. There was no orientation. The seeds of post-modernism had been sown.

With an empty image of the future, reaction at first set in. There was a search for roots, a nostalgia for the past. Representing varying degrees of reaction, Ronald Reagan, the Moral Majority and Jean-Marie Le Pen came forward. And, in a much more serious way, the very universalism of Reason from the industrial period was rejected in favor of pure difference: I am homosexual, I am Chicano, I am woman, I am black. Then, finally, came the narcissism of the “yuppie” who so lacked even a reminiscence of personality that his individuality was defined entirely according to the conventions of status consumption.

At this same moment in the West, during the 1970s and 1980s, technological revolution was taking place—from computers to bio-engineering to satellite broadcasting. In purely material terms this marked the beginning of reconstruction. Today we are just passing to the other side of the emptiness. We are beyond the crisis of our incapacity to act and are entering the first stages of cultural reconstruction. The first actors which appear clearly in the early stage of reconstruction are the most powerful—the communication elites of the mass media who are the producers of language, symbols and images. In the Information Age, those with the means to define society’s image of itself have the central power.

I like Touraine because he’s all about individual agency; he sees oppositional power, and the ability to reshape society located at the individual level, and he places the role of culture at the center. I’m still wrapping my head around his vision of individualism and subjectivity, but it seems to be founded on the notion of learning to accept each individual’s cultural autonomy – the ability to speak for yourself and to engage each other’s differences on equal footing, democratically. He’s not a postmodernist; it’s not relativism that he’s advocating – it’s how to get beyond the trap of relativism that degrades culture and how to live together in an interconnected, multicultural world.

This view of cultural reconstruction argues, against post-modernism, that society does have a center and that center is conscious man, the subject and actor, capable of constructing cultural models.

To me this illustrates why blogs (etc) and democratized digital media in general are so important, they are tools by which the “reconstruction” of culture (and through culture, social relations [is that the right order?]) can be directed and contested more openly and democratically than ever:

At this critical stage of cultural reconstruction, the main conflicts revolve around the invention of language and images that redefine man’s relationship to nature.

This post is messy and unfocused. May or may not revise it later. I’m starving and can’t think, might write more later. Thnking out-loud is good though.

I like this ad from 1980. It’s full of little things that have become cliche in motion graphics, but it still looks fresh (aside from the music and Leonard Nimoy’s voice, haha). The computer animation when it gets to “communications” is slick.

A few shots taken while wandering around Seoul. Drawing lots of attention from curious people while taking these. The pictures remind me of Kayo Dot’s music, which I love.

“Tell me why world, unfathomable and good,
The beauty of everything is infinite and cruel.”

www.myspace.com/kayodot

I’m in Korea and my car is in America. I listed it for sale right when the economy nose dived and credit dried up; my timing is terrible. It’s a 1999 Honda Prelude. Not a bad car, but leaves something to be desired if you want a real sports car. It looks nice, it has more than enough power for getting around while entertaining yourself and your passengers (ask anyone who’s driven with me..), and the stock suspension is very solid around the corners. The 200hp H22 matched to ~3000lbs of car is far more fun than a Civic, but it’s nothing to brag about.

I think I’ve outgrown it. Lately I’ve been obsessed with the idea of a Cosworth supercharged 2006 Miata NC. Light weight around 2400lbs, rear wheel drive, manual, with a nearly flat ~200-210lbft torque curve at the wheels and ~240rwhp. I’ve never been a Miata fan, and they have some stigma, but you can’t argue with numbers like that. Sounds like fun. Fun that I probably can’t afford ($13,000 for the car, $5500 for the supercharger kit). But it’s good to day dream.

MX-5 Miata NC

In the end, I will probably just pay off my Prelude and have some fun with it. Maybe install some Tein SS coilovers and replace my dented hood with carbon fiber to drop a little weight.  Or something. Someone please buy it!

The subway in Korea is great, but I miss cruising down the 101 through Downtown LA, or up Mulholland and down Beverly Glen, or playing on the twisty roads up in the mountains, and generally taking every corner too fast just for the fun of it…

Here’s a bit of what my daydreaming looks like:

Also this. (Plus watch the Ferrari in the beginning, it’s a rocket ship).

Brian Goodwin in a Supercharged MX5 at Cal Speedway 11/22/08 from Mark Vaden on Vimeo.

Good post on the problems with Korean cyberspace.

 http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2009/01/some-more-thoughts-on-the-korean-internet-and-cultural-barriers-to-content-production.html

A team from Stony Brook University in New York scanned the brains of couples who had been together for 20 years and compared them with those of new lovers. They found that about one in 10 of the mature couples exhibited the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as people commonly do in the early stages of a relationship.

Previous research suggested that the first stages of romantic love, a rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions that psychologists call limerence, start to fade within 15 months. After 10 years the chemical tide has ebbed away.

h/t sullivan 

Only one in ten. What does that say about people and relationships?  On the other hand, boiling “love” down to a chemical reaction seems, well, not very romantic and a bit deterministic. Do we choose the people we love, or is it out of our control? Stepping back even further, which scenario is most desirable? Choice, chance, or (biological) fate? I think that our language is lacking in its ability to capture the many different things subsumed under the word “love.” Going back to the article and study, some seem to correlate love with the experience of “limerence,” but do you really want a “rollercoaster ride of mood swings and obsessions” for decades? I’m not sure how that’s supposed to sound like some kind of ideal, maybe it’s a good thing that only 1 out of 10 felt that way.

Limerence is apparently a fancy word for having a crush on someone (though it is actually more complicated than that). The wikipedia article is pretty ridiculously expansive.

“Limerence involves intrusive thinking about the limerent object; acute longing for reciprocation; some fleeting and transient relief from unrequited limerence through vivid imagining of action by the limerent object that means reciprocation; and fear of rejection and unsettling shyness in the limerent object’s presence.”

If you read through the whole entry on limerence, it’s basically a giant catalog of obsessions, anxieties, and mental games that comprise the pretext and beginning of a relationship.  This is why I think being single for a time ain’t a bad thing, it’s freedom from this giant distraction. Sure, anticipation and uncertainty and games and all that are fun, but it’s also kind of a fruitless waste of time and energy if you’re endlessly in that state (either through short relationships, or a string of love interests). There’s a time and place for everything, sometimes its good just to be yourself by yourself.

At the same time, I think that love (in various forms) is crucial; foundational to the liberal and Christian worldview I find most convincing and appealing.

Unrelated to the article above, I came across a paper comparing Tolstoy and Solov’ev’s views on love. This bit bears put into words something I’ve been thinking – it reminds me of Touraine’s idea of subjectivity and radical/cooperative individualism (the end of society, which is something that I’ve also been seeing in Tolstoy’s writing) that I wrote about in my thesis, but in more relatable terms.

Solov’ev champions, above all, the crucial role of the other in the liberation of the self. He argues that love for another fellow human being, distinct and unrelated to the self in any preexisting biological way, enables a lover to escape the confines of his or her solitary ego in the vital recognition of a subjectivity as uniquely valid as his or her own. In later works, Solov’ev expands on this point to argue that common bonds with other beings can only be established on the basis of an acknowledgment of their existence as independent, conscious entities, and through a commitment to protecting their autonomy.

Moving beyond this statement’s validity in terms of an individual relationship, I think this is also integral frame of mind to cultivate in any truly revolutionary social movement aiming for greater justice, equality, democracy, sustainability, etc. Especially those that transcend national and cultural boundaries. But I’m getting ahead of myself to thoughts that are still underdeveloped. More later.

For a while now, a Korean blogger under the name Minerva has drawn a lot of attention for his writing on the economic collapse going against the official line of the Korean government. Some speculated that he was an insider posting anonymously.

Now someone alleged to be Minerva has been arrested, and he turns out to be a 30-something with little more than a 2 year degree.  It’s part of a seemingly wider effort to curtail freedom of speech and press, as the major broadcasters are coming under threat of greater control and some officials advocate legislation to do away with anonymity on the Korean parts of the internet.

Among governments struggling to contain the global financial crisis, South Korea set a rare and controversial example over the weekend by arresting a popular blogger who was accused of undermining the financial markets but worshipped by many Koreans as an online guru.

The man, known throughout South Korea by the pen name of Minerva – after the Roman goddess of wisdom – upset the government with his doomsayer’s forecasts for the economy and his satirical attacks on President Lee Myung Bak’s policies.

But when some of his predictions on the markets proved right, he gained a huge following among South Koreans fretting over an uncertain economic future.

Park Dae Sung’s arrest on Saturday on charges of spreading false online information with a harmful intent – a crime punishable by up to five years in prison – came as the South Korean government was escalating its efforts to fight the fallout of the global financial turmoil.

[...]

The government camp hopes that Park’s case will lend weight to the Lee government’s attempt to regulate the country’s vigorous and unruly online communities. But the main opposition Democratic Party has accused the government of gagging the Internet, a popular venue for anti-government criticism.

The story is less about the content of Minerva’s posts than the government response, which is a great embarrassment and disappointment. Korea is so advanced in many fields of IT development, yet displays such backwardness in action and policy.

IHT story here.

Good article by Hua Hsu in the Atlantic on the changing dynamic of race and culture in America. Especially good treatment of what “whiteness” means in America’s changing demographic makeup.

As a purely demographic matter, then, the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.

The article is good in that it doesn’t lose sight of entrenched inequalities, and sees the variety of “white” responses to demographic shift (and power shift, as “white” people come to terms with it), from self-denial and identity crisis to defensive withdrawal into identity groups. But it’s ultimately optimistic, as am I, about the potential for a new era of respect for individuals as individuals, and the democratization of American culture.

But maybe this is merely how it used to be—maybe this is already an outdated way of looking at things. “You have a lot of young adults going into a more diverse world,” Carter remarks. For the young Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s, culture is something to be taken apart and remade in their own image. “We came along in a generation that didn’t have to follow that path of race,” he goes on. “We saw something different.” This moment was not the end of white America; it was not the end of anything. It was a bridge, and we crossed it.

It’s a camera/mask for diving. But I think it’d be more fun to wear while wandering around during the day. Don’t you? Especially with the little lights on.

Came across his stuff through collab’s with Dabrye. Really like his lyric and style. It’s sharp, critical, and the delivery is slick.

http://www.myspace.com/kadencemcasheis