Month: December 2008

Embracing misery, awaiting death. The story of the sick wuss.

I’m sick as a puppy kicked with boots of botulism, and have spent the past week building myself a cocoon of self-pity out of spit, phlegm, slime and mucous. My brother and I have taken turns to laugh hysterically at our miserable state and inactivity; I have listened to old episodes of How to disappear completely and drunk copious amounts of tea. As an aside, I have little faith left in the healing powers of whisky – massive headache followed our attempt at Scottish healing.

The running shoes I brought are still in their bag. The book I brought has only been opened once. All meetings with friends came to naught and I’ve spend some ten hours looking for a new cellphone because I have come to hate the Samsung I’m currently stuck with. On the bright side, I did get to ride a taxi from downtown to Kungsängen, which put my suburb in a more accessible place, albeit only mentally.

As things stand, I’m looking for ways to get home to Gothenburg in time to infect everyone in the city with whatever it is that I have. The streets will run foul with the stench of decay and poor hygiene, and civilisation as we know it will be no more! That, or I’ll just have a cocktail and go home and sleep post fireworks.

Below is a Explosm.net cartoon, followed by one from XKCD.com. Both required reading in these times.

Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, gives a live demo of a mind control device that uses a person’s thoughts to input computer commands.

→ Fora TV: Tan Le at The Entertainment Gathering, Dec 12 [via Tobias]

BILLION DOLLAR BILLBOARD – By Lee Beavington

Damien gasped.
“Look at the stars! They’re MOVING!”
His friends ignored him, stumbling over the beach with bottles in hand. Damien dug his toes in the sand and craned his neck. He tried to rationalize the tiny, shifting white lights. Too far to be planes, too close to be planets. The several dozen scattered twinkles rearranged themselves in the cloudless sky. Maybe he had had too much to drink. Unless..

A moment later he read the constellation of satellites.
DRINK DUKE BEER!
Then the satellites dispersed. A friend slapped him on the back. “Do as it says, eh? Bottoms up!”

→ From the webpage of G. W. Thomas, where a different author presents a very short piece of fiction each day. I recommend you subscribing to it by email here: www.gwthomas.org

God, AIDS and tools in orbit.

God essentially created two conflicting accounts of Creation: one in nature, and one in the Torah. How can it be determined which is the real story, and which is the fake designed to mislead us? One could equally propose that it is nature which presents the real story, and that the Torah was devised by God to test us with a fake history! One has to be able to rely on God’s truthfulness if religion is to function. Or, to put it another way — if God went to enormous lengths to convince us that the world is billions of years old, who are we to disagree?

→ Wikipedia, rebuttal of the Omphalos hypothesis by Rabbi Natan Slifkin

Anti-retroviral drugs used to treat HIV/Aids are being bought and smoked by teenagers in South Africa to get high.

→ BBC: Getting high on HIV drugs in S Africa [via WarrenEllis.com]

Remember the toolbag that an taikonaut kosmonaut astronaut dropped a couple of weeks ago while fixing the ISS? Well, you can track it – along with any other satellite – here: 33442 Shuttle Toolbag

Burlesque! Caffeine & Suicide! Mustache!

Last Friday was spent at a party. A burlesque party. To better fit in with the crowd of Manson fans and strip-tease performers, I presented myself in tights and with a mustache + soul patch. I’m going to try this feature on for a couple of days. So far most people are bemused. I don’t know, is it too Wyatt Earpy? (Also, please notice the author pose I have going on. I’d be an awesome writer if I would only not have to actually write something)

Newspaper publishers should consider consolidating and outsourcing news operations — even overseas — to save money as revenues continue to shrink, the head of a major U.S. newspaper company said Monday.

→ USA Today: Outsourcing could be in journalism’s future.

In July of this year, the now-defunct Eureka Reporter reported that McClatchey has outsourced the copy editing of the Orange County register to India, outsourced the advertising design department of the Fresno Bee to India, and had intended to outsource the copy editing of the Miami Herald to India but ultimately changed its mind on that one.

→ Watching the watchers: Offshoring/Outsourcing Journalism: The Unstoppable Bad Idea?

Although caffeine does not produce with life-threatening health risks commonly associated with the use of classic drugs of addiction such as cocaine, heroin and nicotine, some caffeine users report becoming “addicted” to caffeine in the sense that they report an inability to quit or to cut down their caffeine use, they continue to use caffeine despite having medical or psychological problems made worse by caffeine. and they continue to use caffeine to avoid experiencing caffeine withdrawal symptoms.

→ John Hopkings Medical Center: Information about Caffeine Dependence

The motif of harmful sensation is a recurring idea in literature: physical or mental damage that a person suffers merely by experiencing what should normally be a benign sensation. The phenomenon appears in both traditional and modern stories.

→ Wikipedia: The motif of harmful sensation

Both McKinney and Bedard told me about people who took Tylenol or phosphorous, which also destroys the liver (and incidentally produces phosphorescent vomit). In both cases, they slept off the initial sickness and recovered for five days — during which time they decided suicide was a mistake after all and they wanted to live. But the liver had been destroyed and after five days each of them started to feel very sick, passed into deep coma, and died. “He knew it would happen and that there was nothing we could do about it,” Bedard said, “and his friends and family knew it, and for five days they sat in the hospital together waiting for it.”

→ How not to commit suicide, by Art Kleiner, 1981

I want you to know that I have a deep affection for you. I am deeply grateful for all your kindness. I wish I could have made a happier life for you. It was mostly my fault, please forgive me.

→ Suicide notes. ibid.

Jill Tracy – Evil night together:

[audio: https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/01-evil-night-together.mp3]

I’m looking specifically about a rejection of postmodern theory (I apologize for the broad terminology), that looks at thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze, Jameson, etc etc, that accurately comprehend their arguments, and then rejects them. That is, if postmodernist thought is broadly characterized by a general rejection of singular, grand narratives and a method of critical thought that involves a disbelief in foundations — then I’m specifically interested in arguments that go against these characterizations and arguments.

→ Ask.metafilter: Anti-postmodernism for postmodernists?