Category Archives: technology

First World Problems: the PowerPoint Slideslow

Posted on by
sad walrus is embarrassed for you

sad walrus is embarrassed for you

Of COURSE it’s a Powerpoint.

PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people. It allows you to arrange text and graphics in a series of pages, which you can project, slide by slide, from a laptop computer onto a screen, or print as a booklet (as Sarah Wyndham did). The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.

 

I am proud to say that I have stuck firmly to my Never Learning Powerpoint policy and am instead learning Prezi. I think Malcolm Gladwell would be disappointed and Marshall McLuhan would be proud, and that’s enough for me.

Speaking of First World Problems!

On the Morally Ambivalent Robin Hood Criminal Archetype in the Early Twenty-First Century OR Julian Assange is a Big, Fat Stainless Steel Rat

Posted on by

which is nothing less, although possibly nothing more, than a comparison of Julian Paul Assange, founder of Wikileaks, recipient of the Sydney Peace Foundation medal, the UK Media Award from Amnesty International,  the Sam Adams award, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, (etc etc TK already) and the minor sci-fi character James Bolivar (“Slippery Jim”) diGriz, aka de rat van roestvrij, aka die Edelstahlratte, aka El Escurridizo, aka un criminale al nichel-cromo, aka (my favorite) Ratinox, aka the (you thought we’d never get here, didn’t you?) Stainless Steel Rat, protagonist of Harry Harrison’s The Stainless Steel Rat books, a moderately popular but enduring series of science fiction comedy-adventure serials.

Harry Harrison on OK Cupid oh and Cupid is SO NOT OKAY with using a fake name

Harry Harrison on OK Cupid oh and Cupid is SO NOT OKAY with using a fake name

Did I say “Harry Harrison?” Gee, it’s awfully early in the post to be that confused: of course I did! That name should ring a few bells for Assangeologists, particularly those of a fangirlish turn, for it is the usernomdeplume that Assange employed on sites as High Nerdy as delicious and as decidedly non-nerdy as OKCupid (come for the casual sex, stay for the quizzes!).

That’s so funny: every guy I know calls himself “Steve” on dating sites.

Well, it occurred to one (and that one this one, this one right here) that, worthy as Mr. Harrison’s screenplay for Soylent Green undoubtedly was, that sort of thing won’t get you far on a dating site (although it is a people business, come to think of it but now that I have, I wish I hadn’t. Not to say it doesn’t explain a whole lot about my dating life, but ENOUGH of that line of thinking, moving ON! What? What? STOP LOOKING AT ME) dystopian dramas really don’t pull the chicks like being a dashing James Bond villain-type.

Viva Julian the TinTinja, but that's a whole OTHER post.

Viva Julian the TinTinja, but that's a whole OTHER post.

Of the type typified by the above-mentioned and highly morally ambivalent Stainless Steel Rat. So I’m thinking, Golly, if I were a dashing James Bond villain-type of man who was strongly identifying with the works of Harry Harrison (not Harrison himself, because that would be creepy and somewhat self-defeating on a dating site as he is well out of Top Pulling age range although I’m sure a charming enough man in person and with some advantageous lighting) I would be identifying with ol’ Slippery Jim, you bet your sweet bippy I would, whatever that is, because whatever Harrison’s other books, Return to Eden, West of Eden, and Winter in Eden are about, I’m relatively sure they are NOT related to the rather tedious Anne Rice erotic novel, and believe me, there’s nobody in there you’d actually want to identify with, particularly if they could be played convincingly in a movie by Rosie O’Donnell, as none of them were, according to the reviews. And Clan of the Cave Bear, which I imagine to be much the same, didn’t get anybody laid. So, that.

And here, an interlude, because my English teachers taught me you can never have too many references in a scholarly work of this nature.

DiGriz himself, although an accomplished liar and a notorious intergalctic thief, did have values, he saw his exploits as not only a means to get rich but also as an entertainment for the masses which caused his plans to get bigger, brasher and bolder…he had a reputation to uphold after all. He was also quite proud of the fact that he never took a penny from anyone without insurance cover and his intended targets were usually powerful institutions with little scruples themselves.

But where was I? Oh yes, introducing Ratinox. Did you ever see the old Batman tv series? Stick with me here, this is good stuff. There’s a payoff, I promise. So, “Batman” was my sister’s first word, but no, that’s not the payoff (unless you’re the proud parent who can swan around the play group for weeks like a queen because YOUR little girl’s first word had two syllables and was a superhero besides; OR you are The Sister, in which case you’re used to this bullshit but are glad it’s you-centric for once). In those old Batman series, as rich a guide to the world of comic comicbook criminality as existed, just before the villain tried to kill off Bats and the Boy Blunder, he’d tell them the whole plan from start to finish, slowly, presumably for those in the audience too stupid to riddle out the riddles (which meant everyone who couldn’t afford the kinds of drugs the writers were on at the time). And so it is with the comic comicbook criminality of Slippery Jim diGriz, who will tell you just everything about himself if you read far enough through the books, and you will, if only to see if his wife finally does kill him or not.

So, let us read. All excerpts below are just from The Stainless Steel Rat for President, the most political of the books (yes, this is going to be a whole series; there are a LOT of books):

Anon and On

Posted on by
Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing

Anonymous vs the Police which is not exactly a new thing

Dear Nonymite: you do realize you’re flipping off the photographer, not the cops, right? Jesus, EVERYONE hates the paparazzi!

Compare and contrast to our earlier Nony in London:

Work it, V!

Work it, V!

This is a democracy! VOTE, DAMMIT!!!

Whichever you prefer, the mere existence of Anonymous reminds us that the present moment, yes, this exact moment, is one that has never come before, and will never exist again. It won’t be long until existing power structures have either shattered into a new, digital Brownian Motion model of solipsistic yet collaborative civilization OR the fascists have infiltrated and wiped out the free thinkers, resulting in something akin to the Orwellian KleptoReich that Putin’s got going in Russia.

And that, my friends, reminds me of this, from the great prophet Hunter S. Thompson. Think carefully about these words, because for just this particular second of time, they apply again.

“It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era — the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ‘history’ it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened

My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights — or very early mornings — when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour… booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turnoff to take when I got to the other end… but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: no doubt at all about that…

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda… You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning…

And that, I think, was the handle — that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting — on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark — that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

Where will you be when it does?

UPDATED: a couple of hours after I posted this, I found the following video, which claims to lay out the one-year plan of Anonymous. Presenting The Plan:

“While the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power.”

I have a copy of the Manual of Afghani Jihad (the CIA translation) and selections from the Japanese Kamikaze documents, and said back then that if we in the West had any documents as spiritually compelling as those, we would have no alienated teens, no existential crises. It’s literally unthinkable to most people in the affluent nations that their individual lives could actually have meaning; why is this so, when their nations wield the greatest financial and political power on the planet? When they enjoy personal freedoms undreamed-of in most of civilization and throughout history? Why is this, when destitute citizens of the poorest states on Earth change history every day as if it’s their birthright?

And it is.

Could this video and plan from Anonymous actually be That Call, the call to the hearts of the people of the West, for which we have been waiting?

Only you can answer that.

Coming Back to Earth

Posted on by
Twitpic of space shuttle landing

Twitpic of space shuttle landing

I would just like to comment on the epistemological and socio-cultural implications of receiving a Twitpic of this moment, fresh from an astronaut at NASA, on my TweetDeck.

HOW FRICKIN’ COOL IS THAT?????

That is all.

Be a Movie Producer!

Posted on by

or look just like one…

Oh god, not ANOTHER one!

Oh god, not ANOTHER one!

No, it’s true: this is a plan to enable you to put “movie producer” on your business card, which will come in handy on a Friday at the clubs, if no-where else. Actually, it will count for something with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who will allow any actual credited producer to purchase a ticket to the Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars.

Come to think of it, I’ve got a friend who’s always wanted to go. Hmmmm…

Allow me to introduce With Glowing Hearts, the motion picture:

So far, so awww, right? Yes, it’s an inspirational documentary, perhaps the least likely to be commercially successful genre of film in filmdom. How can you become a producer of this acclaimed-but-so-far-unreleased soon-to-be-classic? Easy; everybody knows there’s one way to become a producer.

You come up with the money.

In this case, you can come up with amounts as small as a Toonie:

Making a film costs money, and although we’ve done a great job at keeping our costs down there are certain expenses which are unavoidable. That’s why from now, until the middle of August, we’re running our Toonie and Tweet Torch Relay to help get us to the finish line and to get your name in the credits.  Starting with a minimum contribution of $2, “producers” can have their name published in a word cloud that will appear in the film’s credit roll and on this site. Increasing your contribution will increase the size of your name in the cloud.

All money collected will go directly towards costs related to finishing and distributing the film like insurance, music rights, and salaries for the great people who have been working on the film with us.  Just click on the Chip-In widget to the right and follow the instructions to use either your PayPal account or credit card, note that transactions are conducted in US dollars but will be converted to your local currency on your bill.  The name that is associated with your PayPal account is the same that will be used for the credits, if you would like a different name to appear in the credits please indicate that under “special instructions for vendor” on the “Review your payment” page.

Sure, it says mid-August, but if you ask nicely you’ll probably find there’s always room for more money (though perhaps it will need more zeros after the 2). Go on, haven’t you always wanted to be a Hollywood big shot? I hear Clooney is breaking up with his latest bimbette, so if you’re a brunette and you can get him good and drunk at the Vanity Fair afterparty, you’ve probably got a shot.