HEY DEL.ICIO.US USERS!!!!!

I have an idea.

what you do is: when you want to forward an article to some other del.icio.us user, you use the tag for:username. and so everyone subscribes to the tag for:myusername and voila, the world becomes a happy nice place in which to live instantaneously.

I don’t usually mouth off about semantic-web geek nonsense but hey this is some semantic-web geek nonsense I can get with, yeah.

I already did it. now you do it!

yeah!

-fish

"that first year or sp I had out of [undergraduate college], that was the best, because I spent like 12 months doing ugly shit for corporations, right, but then I took four months to go to australia. I worked my own shit the whole time I was there. it was great. I mean, I'm still sort of mining the shit I did there for my corporate money type work and shit. achieveing that kind of balance, like on the regular, is kind of like the holy grail of this kind of work and shit."

"once, in australia, we were fantastically drunk and high and fucked up and whatnot, and we went out walking in collingswood. we found this one garage, right, that was always open, night and day, but never with anyone inside, right? and so we walked up through it to the roof. the building was a large squat structure with a taller, narrower one coming off the top? and we found this fucked up shantytown just like built there on the roof. it was, like, straddling the HVAC systems for the lower building and shit. it was some crazy shit.

"but so this other night, we were even drunker and more fucked up, and this one friend of ours was with us. he was leaving that night, like he was getting in a cab to the airport at like 4AM. so we took him up through the garage to see the shantytown. but it was gone, like, totally demolished, right? and there was this huge hole punched through the building's core, so of course we crawled through and found this enormous labyrinthine network of crazy disorienting shit. it was nuts. we went back on several occasions, taking pictures and recording it all, and all that. this one time, like, the last time we were there, we'd been marching though it all and we found this big... gate. like, hrm, like a garage door, you know? and we pulled it up and there was the street. I will never forget that shit. it was so crazy, to see the street there, I mean like it was the last thing we expected. we were so twisted around and disoriented that we thought we were either miles underground or, like, high above everything, right? and so to see the street there was so ultra fucked. I pray to god that I will one day be that deliciously disoriented in a relatively safe way sometime again."

yes. I love it when I wake up and my kitchen table is covered in equal parts eating untensils and metallurgy tools.

so. is there untapped power in being ignorant? I can’t stop thinking about this type of shit, since I got into a huge argument with one of my professors towards the end of school. if you accept the possibility that stereotypes spread like disease, than maybe only ignorance can unmake them. I don’t know. the fight we got into was because he kept talking about how completely unconcionably awful contemporary media is, particularly television. my point was that he is complicit in its awfulness cuz he sits there and watches it. unfortunately I sounded like one of those whiny pseudointellectual “I don’t watch TV” guys, but this was not my aim I swear.

one thing about that that I brought up at the time was how in high school, for this psychology class, we saw a video about some of the common 20th-century stereotypes that have been applied to black people. a great many of the stereotypes I saw portrayed in the video were ones I hadn’t been exposed to in my life prior to that point, and it pissed me off and saddened me that I had been quote-unquote infected with them by a tool that was designed to promote awareness of the steretypes in question with their eradication in mind. that didn’t matter cuz they were stuck in my head anyway, for better or for worse. I hate that shit.

meh. anyway. I’m not one of those “I don’t watch TV guys”. I have proof. when I haven’t been working my ass off on the bullshit art projects depicted above, I’ve been watching 24 like a total ass. if I had an actual TV I would watch it on the TV, rather than a computer, so that must count for something. yes.

now I must carve linoleum. pray that I don’t take a finger off. yes yes!

-fish

• made about 20000 tons of paper pulp, using both a "hollander beater" and a "whiz mixer". both of these machines were obviously cobbled together out of spare parts by enterprising handmade-paper afficionados who realized they could get grade-A markup selling their sketchily constructed homebrew equipment to schools like risd. the "whiz mixer" especially... it's basically a sump pump motor (which I know because it still has a sticker on it that says "sump pump motor") attached to a 3ft long rotor with a little 6inch propellor at the end. you jam it in a trash can full of water and pulp-to-be and it "whiz mixes" your shit all up. anyway I used them both to make prodigious amount of pulp, which I am very proud of, which is silly cuz if I take one step back and look at it w/ one ounce of perspective I see that what I made, and what I'm self-congradulatorily braying on about, is essentially 5 buckets of multicolor sludge. whooptie shit.
• spent 90 bucks on varnish, wire, sockets, bulbs, et cetera, so I can finish this esophagus-looking light. I have never made a light before, and it's quite fun. one fun thing about it is the fact that I have constructed it w/o attempting to impregnate it with any sort of "meaning" or "theoretical aim" or any of that nonsense. it's just a lamp, like the one the nerd kid in the breakfast club so poignantly failed to make.
• smoked 1/2 a pack of cigarettes
• listened to 3 Channel Metropolitan on loop for at least 80% of the time I was in my apartment after waking
• bought a coffee and drank it. this was a monumentous occasion worthy of mention as I've been broke for a week, since moving into my new digs, and I finally got some loot this morning at 8AM, which apparently was when the piece of software that controls my personal ID number deep within the Bank of America(tm) central command computing facility decided I was cool enough. the coffee had cream in it but no sugar. yes.
• checked email, flickr, delicious, bloglines etc. a bunch of times
• completely failed to make any progress in cleaning my shit up. I have resolved to deal with this after risd "winter session" is over. until then I will slink around in the alleys created by the mountains of my own posessions and not think about the problem at all whatsoever. yup.
• finished torrenting the first season of 24. this is not my fault. my dear friends kevin and jack coerced me into the vile trap that is this television show. now I must watch it. fuck.
• did absolutely zero work on rebuilding the clamshell box I egregiously fucked up the other day

• tons of light; windows on two of four walls in main room as per the decree of mr. alexander
• it's huge
• good water pressure in shower
• interesting tiles in bathroom
• sloped walls (cuz it's in the 3rd floor of what was once a large house; I like this cuz I grew up in my attic back in the day, you see)
• lots of storage space: 4 closets total plus many kitchen cabinets, etc
• bedroom closet is a john malkovich style door
• free wifi via the neighbors and their default settings
• ROOF ACCESS!!
• free heat that works. no more huddling in front of a space heater.
• 1 block away from commercial strip with food, coffee, movie theater, etc etc
• I am 10000% stronger than I was before I moved here as a result of hauling all my unnecessary shit up and down several flights of stairs in order to get here

• have yet to meet any non-sketchy neighbors f2f
• three deadbolts. at first, considering what has gone before, I thought this'd be in the "good things" list, but it makes you kind of wonder
• aforementioned proximity to commercial area (and neighboring brown university campus) cuts both ways sometimes w/r/t drunken nocturnal buffoons and their powerful vocal chords
• heat and cold pipes are reversed in both sinks and in the shower, which can be confusing early in the morning, or at least until I get used to it
• my shit is still in a pile in boxes and not neatly arranged around the place like it was in my imagination before I moved in

you know I love metropolis magazine and all, but whenever they or anyone else goes on about the {house,kitchen,dwelling} of the FUTURE!!!! and then end up blabbing on about a house that is basically chock full of digital crap I am all just like what?!?!? much more interesting, I think, are ideas like this. I know it’s kind of absurdly idealistic, and not w/o it’s aesthetic hurdles to overcome (hell it’s from a site called “treehugger”) but still. people are thinking about how to build the “house of the future” as opposed to how to cram a modernist-looking box fill of HDTVs that talk to your milk and boots via bluetooth, and shit.

metropolis shouldn’t really get singled out like that, tho, cuz after all the winners of that big competition of theirs are a bunch of youthful hip boston-based “tree huggers” intent on remixing big-dig refuse into places in which people could live. so that’s pretty cool. on a similar note, last week some architecture student here actually stopped by my papermaking class, so he could get some ideas on this modular component thing he’s building out of recycled paper that can be used to make actual load-bearing walls. see, that’s fucking awesome. I would guess he could give less than one shit about using windows CE to control the muzak in the bathroom in whatever gets made out of his shit. yeah.

I’m thinking about this, and you should too, becuz philip johnson is DEAD. for anyone who lived in the 20th century, this is arguably very sad, whether you loved him or threw darts at his picture daily. he made a GLASS HOUSE so you and your high-concept pals wouldn’t have to. (the actual pic of that that I was looking for was the one in the intro to “complexity and contradiction” but I couldn’t get google images to puke it out, and my scanner is packed as you can see).

I just finished reading “the international style” the night he died, too, which kind of creeps me out. like how max ernst’s bird died the night his sister was born, and that’s why he was such a nutter? that’s maybe a bit of a stretch. ok but yeah it’s still fucked.

so yeah I’m packing to move across town. while I will miss the lovely hipster diner around the corner, and the italian-food panacea I walk past every day on my way to school, I will not miss my sketchy landlords, or the people who stole my shit. I get much better sunlight, better neighborhood, roof access, more space, etc etc blahblahblah in the new place, which is also cheaper. a no-brainer, it is.

ok yeah. have to disassemble my bed now. more after that, when I’m installed in my new dwelling. yeah!

-fish

redid my portfolio last night [~50mb zipped pdf]. for every time you download it, change the names to yours and print it, I shall kill you.

I might not have a place to live come feb 1st. if you live in providence and have some space for rent then by all means TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT. I am beginning to freak out about it to the point where I can’t really sleep. not like I could anyway cuz of other random crapola like too much coffee and the fact that it is so fucking cold that just breathing outside makes your lips shatter and fall off of your face.

going out for more coffee now. in fact. yes.

-fish

yo. sorry about all the comment spam. I’ll do something about it when I remove my head from my ass. right now I’m in the process of committing academic treason, so I can’t really talk. I just wanted to say that I love you and the world is fucking gorgeous and I could really use a walk in the woods or a chance to dip my toes in the oceian sometime soon, to viscerally reaffirm this fact.

YEAH!!!!!!

-fish

yeah so I rode a train across the country, during which I got horribly food poisoned. laura got sick in LA also and had to go to the hospital. then I got home and my house had been robbed. my father and brother got sick as well with various and sundry diseases. a bunch of my friends yelled at one another. someone I know tried to overdose on pills. also a bunch of smaller yet annoying things happened: ipod was stomped, lost the good scarf, spent too much money on taxis in boston and LA, placed a container of yogurt in my pocket for what was supposed to be only one moment only to have it open up and spill all over the pack of cigarettes and pair of mittens that was in there. yes.

BUT IT’S ALL OK, REALLY, cuz today the sun is shining and I got new boots and there’s a pot of fresh coffee in my mom’s old french press downstairs. later I will move out of my house in providence. and also my mom’s husband gave me a small (~2” square) cloth drawstring bag that used to belong to RICHARD STALLMAN! haha!

but yeah. they stole my internet so I’ll have to deal with that. I will also post lots of pictures of everything, but not now. word to you and yours. yes. yes!

-fish

real busy with work now but kevin posted a comment to one of my articles that was full of URLs that didn't show up cuz of the "blog settings", so I just wanted to share it in its full glory. wordup.

-fish

while trying to make a better playlist than il i uncovered some old and new stuff.

first off, you're never online, so dont pretend anyone can im you shit. :) now the music.

if you want a vocalized follow-up to "real ghosts" and the others in that sequence, check out "The Go-Find - Miami" which is the newest shit on morr music. it is very pretty, melodic, maybe sad, maybe a sad person moving to happy. i dunno, but i like it while i'm floating at see in a rowboat, it just feels right.

on a similar note, the new styrofoam is his strongest work yet in my opinion. of course, nothing will ever beat "short album about murder" because its the best ever. but what can you do.

oh and one last thingfor that sequence. someone has released a 320kbps rip of Boards of Canada's Maxima, which is the fricking shit and hard to find except in that 192 version I got from joge.

MF Doom has a new album called "MM Food." I only listed to like 4 songs but they were all good. maybe even great. shouldnt everyone be excited when there's a new MF Doom??

i assume you have that el-p producto "High Water Mark" . I really like it, well, i really really like half of it so... do the math. if you like the more avant garde jazzy stuff i also have gotten into the bad plus, who are crazy and fun and apparently opening for the pixies on their current reunion tour... didnt know that until now, interesting. anyway, its their first major debut, "These are the Vistas," that I have grown to love. mostly for the great versions of heart of glass and (i know i know) teen spirit...

for more hip hopping, the new Gift of Gab is pretty hot. I like the song "The Ride of Your Life," in case you want a specific recommendation. however, they are all really good.

and if you dont have it, there are like 3 great songs on the newest RJD2 even though much of the album you already heard, even tho you never heard it.... it makes me sad when that happens, but sometimes its better than say, metallica's chronological discography, a.k.a. their descent into suck.

OHOHOH! The new solvent is out! i like it, i do.

besides all that, i've been going through old jimi tenor, opiate (the morr music album), the newish ambidextrous has at least 1 great song on it (maybe only one, i cant move on from it), and all of luke vibert's remixes ever. especially the stereolab and moloko ones.

sorry i cant help so much with the rock. i keep listening to black sabbath paranoid. is there a need for more rock than that?

so LAST NIGHT I watched “waking life” again, and when I was going to bed I was all like “I dunno, I think that’d be just great to dream forever, maybe I’ll try that” or some such thing. immediately upon sleeping, I was plunged into a horrible nightmare wherein my RISD friends and I were flying around in some kind of dirigible, which then crashed, and we were captured by some evil guy who locked us all up and made us draw lottery numbers to see in what sequence we would be forced to COOK AND EAT EACH OTHER. you may laugh but it was fucking terrifying. I managed to escape w/ the help of some people but at that point the blinding terror simply increaced as I realized I could not save all my people. it SUCKED. but it was also hillarious in the way that real-life neurology stepped in and proved my idyllic little movie-fueled assumption quite wrong. I was all like OK OK I GET IT for hours after wakening, until I could go drag myself all the way across town and eat up some blueberry pancakes at brickways on wickenden, which got my mind off it.

now it’s thanksgiving and I’m about to go to a bunch of different places, including florida, to see all of my family, which has ballooned out to massive proportions in recent years, thanks to a series of marriages and divorces and remarriages and childbirths and all those other hillarious bits of familial nonsense. I am going to bury my nose in books, and hopefully steal tons of pills out of my mom’s medicine cabinet, and thus I shall get through it all. boy oh boy.

then when I get back I have to make no less than 12 books by hand, I shit you not. so send me your bone folders if you got ‘em, yeah.

I envy my dear associate jesse ball, who I just learned is basically channeling henry miller, as he is vexingly managing to earn a very livable living by loitering in paris writing poetry. some people.

ok yeah. happy turkey to all you. more later.

school has been fucking with me with all these “assignments”, and “homework”, et cetera ad nauseum, but I have managed to fight back and do some things that make me happier than the usual pointless busywork. this dual-japanese-binding red vinyl book, for instance:

… which was so much fun to make that I put off doing a bunch of other shit to make it and had to stay up all night a bunch of times last week. tonight, in fact, looks to be another such burn-the-freaking-candle-at-both-ends rock-till-dawn type extravaganza. when I’m done with my work I will relax with one of the following books until the sun rises:

• jameson, “postmodernism” (2nd time through)
• jacobs, “cities and the wealth of nations”
• eisenmann et al, “folding in architecture”
• itten, “design and form”
• vice magazine, “dos and don’ts”

… because I am feeling the need to steep my brains in as much retardedly over-the-top semantic nonsense as humanly possible, cuz people from archis emailed me saying they want to actually really truly publish my fucking shit, as in on actual paper in a magazine, and as such I have to brush up the existant text for the project, cuz right now it’s some weak bullshit.

anyway yeah. more to come, no doubt, but right now I have to paint a jillion more gouache swatches to further my education in the mysterious world of color. yeah so yeah. talk soon yo!

-fish

maybe the easiest way to think about the past century is: modernism never ended. the whole thing with “postmodernism” was an evolutionary speedbump, but was basically more of the same. same with “antimodernism”. it’s actually secretly modernism cuz we are in the so-called modern age. the key here is differentiating between the greater thrust of modernism from the early-20th-century modernist orthodoxy (corbu/mies/gropius/tschichold et al). you know how sometimes people who want to differentiate islamic fundamentalists from the overarching concept of islam call fundamentalists “islamists”? well you can do the same here: those guys were modernistists. so to speak.

yeah. postmodernism is basically modernism with stuff on it. like the “decorated shed” classification proffered by mr. venturi and ms. scott-brown. decorated sheds are the order of the day in most of the modern world. take off the decorations and it’s just a shed, a box, in the spirit of mies (but not as sexy of course). the radiant city came complete with an enormous ideology attached; what we have now is more or less the same forms that have adapted (but not really mutated away from their initial conceptions) to current late capitalist ideologies. now the sheds are decorated. if you believe mr. venturi (and I am inclined to in this instance) the future of architecture is in iconography. this doesn’t constitute a new movement per se. it does imply a realignment of sub-disciplines in design, but so fucking what. maybe human beings will have to blow themselves up and/or go to space for a new movement, but “less is more” has a circular logic to it that will reduce most everything to its fundamental pragmas in time.

and if you don’t feel me on all that, consider this: I just got some new conditioner that’s all minty and feels like you’re dumping creme de menthe on your head. I don’t know how I feel about what it does to my hair in terms of aesthetics, but I am inclined to use a lot of it, cuz it tingles.

anyway yeah. I need new music. perhaps you can help? just figure out what the next item in the sequence is and tell me the answer! (even better just IM me the fuckin album, yeah):

• hard to earn
• the unseen
• blowout comb
• stakes is high
• black on both sides
• bizarre ride II
• ready to die
• farewell fondle ‘em
• viktor vaughn vaudeville villian
• midnight marauders
• __________________

• loveless
• fever to tell
• sunlight makes me paranoid
• danse macabre
• de stijl
• eureka
• all time quarterback
• violator
• painful
• good news for people who like bad news
• chain gang of love
• __________________

• tridecoder
• sample this
• folk songs for trains, trees, and automobiles
• real ghosts
• a hundred days off
• drop scene EP
• cashier escape route
• remedy
• suzuki
• __________________

now to do laundry. indeed yes.

-fish

earlier this week, I hacked off a small corner of my bathroom door with a jigsaw and ran power and audio cables through the ensuant hole so I can rock the fuck out while taking a shower, shaving the hair off my face, or doing any of the other wonderful things one does in the bathroom.

it’s sunday night, which means color class starts in <6h., which means I am once again going to be up all night making little 1-inch swatches of goache. you’re supposed to do most of your work in your studio space, here. at least that’s the official line toed by the other grads, who are all healthy American adults who enjoy the company of one another and listen to the same three albums, or some shit like that. I for one can’t deal with that type of shit, at least not yet. if we were doing all sorts of exciting crossmodal mutually-reenforcing collaborative projects, then yeah sure fine, but not right just yet. I’d rather sit at home with my idiot “get things done” stupid dance music playlist on with the volume up high. you can’t do that in a studio, and plus in the studio people tend to come up behind you and be all like “what are YOU working on??!?!” while you’re trying to wield a bone folder with maximum precision, and because you’re relatively new and you don’t want to make permanent enemies just yet, you have to stop what you’re doing and wreck whatever mental flow you had and answer in full, instead of screaming FUCK OFF!!! which may or may not be your first impulsive response to that kind of garden-variety interruption.

the upshot of all that is that I’m in my house. erm.

earlier in the evening, I was listening to “blazing arrow” by blackalicious, and the gift of gab said “everything you learn you’re only remembering” and that actually, unironically, made me stop and think. is that what happens as you age? you stop and think more? or is it just that cliches start to come true all around you? I am confused.

this would be my first post from the laptop formerly known as fucked. if you own a powerbook made of aluminum, and you have to replace the hard drive, I’d recommend taking it to a professional geek. the procedure can be executed by normal humans, but you need fucked up bizarro-world screwdrivers that are practically dadaist. you also need good eyesight to find all the tiny bits you’ll drop on the floor, and at least a quart of hard liquor so you can calm yourself down after it’s all done.

ok enough procrastination. yup.

-fish

bleah. did my first all-night school-related homework freakout this sunday PM / monday AM, as I’d been in new york for the weekend rocking out in honor of laura’s 25th. I used a shitton of hyperexpensive so-called “designer’s gouache” to paint a bunch of little 1-inch monochromatic squares. then I went to class and found out that I’d overshot the assignment and done like a week-plus too much work. this was very sad as I’d been done with what I had actually needed to do for that one class at like midnight. I then proceeded to stagger around and talk nonsense to everyone for the rest of the day, cuz I was tired.

laura’s jam was just tits. basically I got exceptionally drunk on very nice whiskey. there was also conversation of the highest order, where every sentence uttered was packed with as many “the family guy” references as it could structurally support. also they played “the choice is yours” at the bar at some point, which predicatably caused me to go insane and jump up and down screaming the lyrics, which in this context was just fine as others were doing similar things and were at least as drunk as I. other things as well, yes, but yes.

got my new hard drive in the mail today, so I can reanimate the dead computer. first tho I need either a teeny tiny set of screwdrivers, or a nerd who has teeny tiny screwdrivers and likes to install hard drives. if you have/are either of these things please step up and I’ll reward you with all the beer in china.

now I have to photograph some patterns and blah blah blah. you don’t really want to read about the minutia of my scholastic exploits, do you? I will save you the bother and terminate this nonsense. good day.

-fish

I went to a used bookstore, where I bought a copy of the pritzker prize award ceremony program for the year 2000. I cut each page off of the binding, including both covers. I then folded the pages into pleats and restacked them. to wit:

… presently, they are awaiting rebinding with rings and grommets. this was for a class on bookbinding I’m taking. the order was given to seek out a book and destroy it; presumably, the idea being that in a book’s unmaking one can learn a thing or two of their making. I had been reading this book “folding architecture”, which laura gave me early last summer, and so I got this assignment, and so the content and context sort of worked out there, n’est ce pas?

yeah so I’m trying to figure out more about this folding architecture thing. according to both the author of the aforementioned book and mr. boyer, this is the quintessential work on the subject. it’s a wonderful way to make forms, tho… low impact (except for the occasional paper cut) and cheap, and the results look nice I think:

… plus, like, you could do this to things like the airline safety card, or magazine blow-in postcards, if you’re bored and stuck somewhere.

erm yes. does anyone know of any 20th century architects who were into zen? when I say “into zen,” I don’t mean “had an asian fetish and as such festooned their shit with tons of faux-japanese gardens and whatnot.” I mean like the way robert irwin was into zen, or john cage, or yayoi kusama, or robert pirsig. well maybe not pirsig, cuz someone told me he went nuts, and was later found curled up in the corner of a plain empty room, gibbering madly, naked and soaked in his own urine/feces. so pre-feces pirsig is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

cuz yeah while doing all the folding, I got to kick back and relax, sorta, cuz it was all very meditative. this was nice. it’s been widely reported that the average person living in the western 1st-world these days is stressed out beyond belief. so that seems to suggest an interesting dichotomy: stress your body, and you become incredibly strong, resilient (nay, “buff”) and adaptive. stress your mind, and you go mad, or at least become stupid from excessive cortisol poisoning. that is of course a perverse generalization (and, you could make the case, another poorly masked instance of the nonstop intellectual romantic idolotry of stereotypical “working class” values) but you get me, yes?

all those aforementioned people were on some serious zen shit, and they got there by doing excessively physically repetitive things. irwin and kusama especially. you could easily say, “aha, kusama, she was nuts as well, wasn’t she?” to which I could say “yeah but irwin most certainly was not, at least not in the traditional sense… he liked fountain sodas and fast cars and hot women, for chrissakes.” plus kusama used her zen powers against her endemic instabilities, so there.

so erm yeah lemme know. in any case, I have to go hack apart some more stuff with x-acto blades. more to come. I will post pictures if I sever a finger accedentally. wordup.

-fish

here’s a trick, if you have a predictable daily walk and it’s getting boring: make a mix playlist. specifically pick songs with lots of stereo effects (e.g. “such great heights”, but I’m sure you can’t stand anything off that album cuz you listened it into the ground like two years ago). make two copies of the playlist: one from start to finish, and the other reversed (from finish to start, if you will). if your playback device is digital, disable shuffling. then so take your walk with the forward playlist, but for the walk back, use the reverse playlist AND SWITCH THE RIGHT AND LEFT HEADFONE CHANNELS. it’s awesome. really it is!

anyway yeah. everthing is a loop. this is what I have been thinking of lately, how everything is a loop. when you create something, you create a loop. the loop breaks when the thing is destroyed. you’re a loop: your heart beat and nervous system are controlled by complex waveforms that repeat until you’re dead. your relationships are closed loops. your computer boots into something called a “main loop”, which is a piece of code that repeats itself until you turn the thing off. a contract is a loop. businesses often forge loops between themselves that spin too fast and too hard for their own internal loops to deal with. wheels and hard drives and tape capstans spin. rain evaporates. all that shit. closed loops.

I would say “excuse my pseudophilosophical bullshit”, except you’re reading a blog, which is the sort of place to go when you want pseudophilosophical bullshit, I daresay, yes.

the leadholders at Utrecht and the RISD art supply shithouse are all garbage.

that is all!

-fish

I just made a batch of seven fried oreos. sounds disgusting, doesn’t it? it’s really, really not at all whatsoever. they’re fucking delicious when fried. warm and gooey and sort of parfaitesque on the inside. I got the recipe from here:

http://fairy.mahdzan.com/story/189.asp

… in which the intrepid fried-food aficionado will find detailed directions and pictures. I plan to fry more oreos in the future. yes.

tomorrow I have RISD orientation. I hope that my food indulgence doesn’t trash my stomach before this. also my g5 will get here, which will be nice, cuz my computer situation is pretty fucking abominable right now.

ok yeah. that’s it really. the inside of a fried oreo looks like this:

ciao!

-fish

so yeah. I was looking around online for results for “I’m just kidding like jason” to see if it was secretly a reference to jayson blair (which of course it isn’t) and I found myself traversing the personal sites of a bunch of random high school kids. this was quite illuminating, because a large percentage of the ones I saw had extremely inventive designs, all of which were neatly implemented with the latest acronyms (css, xhtml, stfu, blablabla). they weren’t perfect, of course, but the volume of stuff that was good in an eyebrow-raising way was much higher than you’d think. they’d talk about normal stuff (“OMG history class is SOOOO BORING”) and casually throw in the fact that they’d redone their xanga or whatever blog sites in stanards-compliant css2/xhtml1.1 or what have you.

on one hand, this was great, cuz it’s like “hahaha all you high-horse css zealot wankerbots are going to be EATEN ALIVE by the children in just a matter of time; please stoppit with the inflammatory geek rhetoric and report to the nearest mickey d’s for retraining” … plus yes yes of course it is always great to see people expressing themselves creatively. right. also it was phenominally depressing cuz I really, really couldn’t do that type of shit at that age. I was very nerdy and I did all sorts of nerd things, so maybe yeah if there was such a thing as css back then, maybe I would have been able to tell you a thing or two about it. who’s to say. but creating anything of any sort was never (and indeed is not) something I could do casually. I always get worked up in some way, internally, and the impression that I got from paging through these weirdly amazing kids’ sites was that they did not have this problem.

aaaahhh. yes. bleah. I’m sure it’s fucking with me more than it would be normally, cuz I’m about to start “art school,” and as such I can’t stop thinking about this type of shit. note that I am not linking in the high school kids’ sites cuz that would just fuck with me more, yes.

but yeah. this also is why I am sick of code: it seems to me to be a big fat waste of time. kids will just eat you up. and who wants that? no one, I’d wager.

anyway yeah. it’s friday and so that’s what I’m doing, here in my apartment, on a friday night. maybe tomorrow I can begin to assemble some sort of social life, as I’m going to meet all the other grads for drinks at some bar somewhere. we’ve all been passing around emails and it looks like they’re just as bored as me. I bet they all have nice non-damaged computers, tho, so harrumph.

ok yeah. enough. I will go read a nice book now. cheers to you!

-fish

when I moved here, to providence, my apartment was basically shit. I spent the first week and a half of my residence unfucking the place. I had to build three banks of bookshelves before I could even unpack the books, cuz I am a fucking supernerd. but anyway. the bathroom was/is the worst off; there is still a gaping hole in the wall and the light in there is absolute crap. one thing I did manage to add was a towel bar. the towel bar looks nice but mounts to the wall in a hideously chintzy fashion: you screw these metal plates into the wall, right, and then attach to the bar to the plates. the bar attaches to the plates at only two points for the whole bar: this little bit where you tighten this one screw with an allen wrench that came with the thing.

so of course the bar fell off, cuz I endeavored to hang a towel on it. the problem is that I lost the fucking allen wrench. for those of you that haven’t yet delved into the bracing world of home furnishings, an allen wrench is a device whose name grandiosely belies its utter cheesiness. it is basically a rail-extruded hexagon made out of cheap metal and bent into an “L” shape, such that a screw with a hole in it the same size and shape of the hexagon can be turned. it also doubly serves to irritate your fingers, plus frustrate you immensely when you lose it altogether.

cuz yeah: I lost the retarded allen wrench. now I have a somewhat nice looking but useless towel bar rattling around my apartment, and two ugly and equally useless metal plates screwed into the bathroom wall. bleagh. if you happen to have a teeny little allen wrench lying around, by all means throw it at me. you won’t be sorry for long.

sorry to be so needy these days regarding physical objects. my computer is still fucked, btw. I managed to get my spare machine bootstrapped in a halfway decent manner (BIG SHOUTZ to those of you who IMed or otherwise sent me pieces of software I needed, yeah) when it started crashing all the time and making strange ‘beep’ noises. I have already had the motherboard on this grabastic machine replaced twice, so my hopes are not particularly high. if I keep the thing directly in front of the full-blast AC, it gets slightly less crashy. what a mess.

anyway yeah. I’m just updating so that that hoplessly long-winded fusedspace bruinsma rant would get displaced from the top of the page, basically. otherwise shit’s just great. today, for example, I ate ravioli with lobster in it. that’s great. more great things happen than non-great things so sorry you have to read about the bullshit. c’est la guerre, yes?

yes!

-fish

so yeah I never got round to talking about that whole fusedspace thing, which I did not win in any way, shape, or form (although I did come close enough to make me pretty happy indeed). people in general had very nice things to say about my proposal, with one notable exception, which I will address (and perhaps whine about) right here.

so yeah. sally jane norman, a tech theorist who does performance art type stuff, left the longest comment:

Amongst the numerous, well assimilated interactive possibilities offered by digital technologies felt as increasingly lacking in the physical world, are possibilities to annotate virtual spaces of various kinds. While it is easy to critique virtual constructs thanks to non-invasive, non-destructive editing tools, similar behaviours in the physical world generally deteriorate the original (writing in books, on walls, etc.). OP:FIX proposes a web-based system to discuss design issues raised by physical edifices and locations, generating useful material for the architectural and urban planning community. By implementing a database to foster critique of public domain undertakings, the project proposes to use new media to constructively articulate requirements and recommendations with respect to public space. The fact that much organisation and reconfiguration of the public domain today occurs outside the general public arena is explicitly and constructively critiqued by the OP:FIX community system. Users who take issue with certain aspects of public domain management can print out barcode labels and affix them to the corresponding physical objects, thus flagging the URL housing critical discussion for other interested parties. This simple strategy is designed to cut through closed political decision-making regarding the public domain. The confrontation of real objects and environments, with virtual forum and database functionalities, provides potentially rich cultural engagement in the digital and physical public domain, apprehended as a reflexive, continuous entity. Parallel exploitation of physical and virtual “mark-up” languages is likely to generate a more holistic vision of the public domain, and of the ways it is structured and organised by and within the city.

… emphasis is mine. I truly appreciate the fact that someone such as ms. norman was able to extract this particular point and paraphrase it thusly. I don’t like to bandy about the concept of “intervention art”, cuz these days anyone who cuts the eyes out of a picture of george bush and subsequently tapes the image across their face is an “intervention artist”, but yeah I was looking to inject a little good ol’ fashioned punk rock into “public space dialogue” with this thing. erm. I would be curious as to what ms. norman thought about the variable city cite, or whether it was at all clear that I was even citing that biznass, cuz I had to butcher the bibliography to fit it all into the little textbox on the fusedspace site. yes.

so yeah. monica narula, a media tactician who co-founded sarai.net, had this to say:

An excellent proposal. The way it combines the possibility of leaving traces, comment and a way of critiquing architecture and design objects (I like the way it highlights public signage as an object of public criticism) is quite remarkable. Also, the fact that it envisages a publicly accessible archive of ‘architectural and design’ criticism by random members of the public is very salutary. The combination of stickers, bar codes and GPS tracking makes for an interface of continuous public interaction and annotation.

… which frankly made me smile big, cuz her work seems to be pretty on, and so it’s just nice when people whose shit is on say nice things about your shit. yes. so far so good. people seem to be grasping what I am talking about here as regards annotation. sure. ok.

a mr. joachim sauter, founder of ART+COM (english site here) broke it down as follows:

OPFix is a suitable object based critique system that enables immediate confrontation with the opinion and perspective of participants. In its unobtrusive and intelligent way it creates awareness of the social and aesthetic responsibility of all creatives who leave their trace in public space.

this was a lovely and poetic comment, I thought. he is able to distill the project proposal down to these two sentences, a key part of which is the bit where you leave the trace. yes. yes!

derrick der kerckhove, director of the mcluhan program in the university of toronto, says simply:

This should be a public service in Toronto…

… to which I can only say: if I can make it happen, good sir, it will indeed be available to you in toronto as well as elsewhere. I’m still going through with the project (ignoring the fact that the opfix site is gratuitously covered in glocks and has been since I bought it in february 2002), and in fact there will be other related sub-projects and whatnot, all in a transglobal, networked, super-tits type fashion. yes.

my favorite comment was by this guy john thackara, founder of ‘doors of perception’ and the motherfucking director of the netherlands design institute:

I got distracted for two hours by the links - but because I was still laughing at the end of that detour, I give this infrastructure my top mark. None of the technical elements is unique - so it will work - and it doesn’t mention Foucault or meeting starngers [sic] on trains - so i want it to succeed. In a perfect new world, architects, planners and developers would get cold sweats at the sighht of a tiny barcode stuck to the wall of their building or site.

… not only did this fellow get my idea, but he was amused by it. that fucking rules, you axed me. overarchingly, I aimed for my idea to be as tongue-in-cheek as one can make such a thing, as well as something that could be fun to do in practice (after all, the concept was informed by my successfully bacchanalian subway postering parties). plus if the guy who runs the fucking MCLUHAN INSTITUTE is circuitously flipping off the type people who go on and on about foucault, you know that shit’s a bit tired.

but so yes. the one negative comment was this one by none other than max bruinsma, the former editor of your favorite graphic design periodical, eye magazine:

A laudable attempt at creating space and opportunity for public debate about design issues. Or about any issue, at that, because the system proposed can of course be ‘tagged’ to other aspects of public discourse as well. On the other hand, when you can use a digi.cam to photograph the circular barcode, you can also use it to take a pic of the building or object in question and publish it on your blog or site, including your critique and an invitation to comment. So why not just provide an online interface that connects these criticisms on the basis of standard coordinates (name of object, address), and forget about having to print out labels? In terms of interface design, this is a fine example of confusing priorities and ending up with a product rather than a service.

hrrrrrmmm… so I confused my priorities, did I? first of all, products and services are not mutually exclusive. I would expect that if you edit a magazine as fascinated by globalism and branding as eye appears to be, you would know this. furthermore, I fail to see how the ‘labeling’ facet of the project makes it a product. also mr. bruinisma’s fellow jury members all seemed to grasp the instrumental role the labels would play in my nascent concept. without the labels, the project is just a communal design/arch blog, and remains accessable only to those with internet access. the labels serve to extend the criticism outside of that realm, to where they (hopefully, wishfully) could actually do a spot of good.

see but yeah. I can take criticism. I love an honest, engaging critique, really I do. I just have this one stipulation: that the criticism actually MAKES SENSE. ok? ok!

yeah. when I found out I didn’t win fusedspace, I sort of shrugged, cuz I didn’t expect to win it anyway. I was overjoyed to have made it to the finals, to be honest. I never even come close to winning stuff like that, so it felt great. then I found out I actually did pretty well, pointwise: I tied for fifth place, with a pretty respectable score. When I read the crits, I was positively overjoyed that respected artists, designers, and theoreticians had not only understood but enjoyed my big idea.

I didn’t think much of mr. bruinsma’s comment until I went to typecon. there was this AIGA event called “double dutch” a day or so before the conference began in earnest, so we went and saw a whole lot of gorgeous examples of dutch typography and design. we also bore witness to mr. bruinsma give a talk about - WAIT FOR IT! - globalism and branding.

at first, I did not associate the guy speaking onstage with the purveyor of the lone invective in my fusedspace crits. I thought the guy was a total fool, though: at one point he showed a slide of a woman in a burqa drinking a coke, and said how it was “a great example of a local culture clashing with a global one”, or some words to that effect. the fact that he’d come to california from the netherlands notwithstanding, he needs to get out more if he thinks islam is at all some sort of quaint “local” phenomenon. he said a bunch of other dumb shit as well, but that once comment stuck out. I stopped taking any sort of notes after that, and I wouldn’t have even recalled that if I hadn’t realized that this was in fact max bruinsma, the self-same fellow who had clumsily knocked my shit.

so yeah at that point I got annoyed about the whole not winning fusedspace issue, which really hadn’t been at all under my skin until I saw that this blundering nincomoop had been one of the ones deciding my fate. that 10,000 euros wouldn’t have hurt at all, you fuckass. it also pisses me off that people like that are INVITED to spew that kind of bullshit. mr. bruinsma and the general public are all welcome to completely detest my proposal, but I beg of you: detest it in a non-stupid way. we’ll all feel much better about the whole sorry affair in the morning, if you do, yeah.

anyway yeah. so to sum up: I lost the fusedspace contest. and in conclusion: max bruinsma is a tard. please excuse this entry as it’s basically me ranting and getting this crapola off my chest. more to come when I get my computer situation unfucked en extremis. wordup.

-fish

yeah so yesterday morning my hard drive started making this sound that is very similar to the sound a ping-pong ball makes when you hold it about 1cm above a hard surface and then drop it. also the computer wouldn’t boot up and it failed every single hard drive-related test in techtool. this happened conveniently 1.5 weeks after the standard warranty expired, and no of course I did not buy applecare for this machine. so yeah there you go.

yeah. I was going to write a big entry about how I’m here in providence, to supplement this abortive tripe, but I’m not going to. instead I’m going to exhort you, the reader, to please help me out. if you find that you can’t send a new laptop hard drive my way, you can still help my computerless ass right out: if you have ANY correspondence, especially with attachments of any sort, that I’ve sent your way, by all means bung it in my general direction if you have a moment. even better, if you have the backup DVD I made a few months ago (the one I can’t seem to find in all my piles of otherwise useless digital media) then please lemme know. for the love of god. yes. I’ll buy you cookies and/or fine european cheese, I will. or bail you out if you get arrested while protesting the NYC republicanfest. or I’ll invite you to gmail, if that sort of thing is your bag. yes.

anyway ok yeah. there will be more to come, I swear, when I get my technical business unfucked. in the meantime I will be reading some books and maybe drawing in a sketchbook with a pencil. I may also find time to punch some walls and/or other hard surfaces with my fist, out of frustration. who’s to say? yeah. word life son.

-fish

uhm so yeah I’m in providence. I moved here, from troy, where I am no longer residing. more to come on this. I’m typing this shit in a cafe located in downtown providence that has an unprotected wifi base station cuz the people who run “cox cable” here have a laughable idea about what constitutes “service” and “connectivity”. I now present a brief list of things I have done in the chasm of time since I last updated:

• went to typecon2004 where, among other things, I personally told the head of linotype that he should not use DRM mechanisms as sales tools. more on this later. also I ate an excellent burrito and developed a sort of man-crush on erik speakermann.
• bought curtains
• packed all of my shit into boxes, paid people to drive it around, then unpacked it
• rode trains
• walked around providence on a friday night with no people, no fone, no ipod, no nothing except keys to get back into my apartment and of course clothing, and bore witness to a massive barfight in a downtown pricey-looking area wherein tons of j.crew looking neckless guys attacked each other and some attendant females screamed in this unholy way that echoed blocks and blocks around
• purchased a hammer and used it to hammer nails into walls
• started drawing boldish italic typeface with cut counters for use as stencil for upcoming mayhem
• lay in freshly unpacked bed staring at cieling wishing I could download something
• ordered calamari and barbecue goat from mexican restaurant, ate aproximately half, wrapped the rest to-go, went home, stowed food in fridge, fell asleep. woke up, looked in fridge, realized all I had to eat was squid and goat. laughed heartily.
• assembled bookshelves
• took showers
• drank some coffee

ok yeah. more when internet comes to me, in my personal house. wordup.

-fish

dude, the charter of the new urbanism just arrived from amazon, and it’s a fucking monster. I was expecting, like, a pamphlet or something. this is the real deal, tho: a heavily annotated collection of essays in support of the whole mess, plus tons of pretty pictures and serifed-up type, printed on nice heavy uncoated stock. I am going to read the fuck out of it, afterwhich I will probably post some more naive bullshit about my feelings. yes.

yes! but so yeah. as regards all this blather: I have calmed down significanly since posting it all and thought about shit somewhat logically. the way I see it is this: program-driven architecture is the logical extension of applied modernism. modernism is a direct product of industrialization, right? ostensibly driven by program. but now “program” is driven by data as abstracted from process. back in the day, data was sort of a by-product of process, but now it’s more the other way around (hence XML, etc etc).

right well yes. ok more when I read the book. toodleoo.

-fish

so yeah this one phrase from this article made everything crystal-clear to me: PROGRAM DRIVEN ARCHITECTURE. or rather ‘programme driven’ as the author would have it. when formulating your aesthetic, let the data do the dirty work. mr. koolhaas gets it, mr. boyer gets it, there’s an army of clerks who know what’s what. I love the architect-speak definition of the word ‘program’; I find it to be a very handy term when discussing this recent rash of data visualization projects out there that have been sprouting up faster than you can namedrop edward tufte.

sarcastic I may be, yes, but fo’real I believe in this shit, and hey I’m guilty too of glibly invoking the trend. and why not? koolhaas baldly says that architecture has become some seriously expensive shit, “serving at best an enlightened private entity,” and at worst a bunch of rich fucks, no doubt. but for the price of a laptop on ebay, you too can create program-based data-driven bullshit systems that look hot.

koolhaas also says, in that hideously-jacketed new book of his, that “architecture” is an excellent sort of postmodern intellectual lens for looking at anything. of course you’d expect a card-carrying architect to spout off some pullquote nonsense like that, but let’s take it literally for a moment. go have a look at the del.icio.us results for ‘architecture’… you get just as many nifty-looking flash visualization thingees as you do actual buildings. you also get a fuckton of computer science geek blogs (as in real geeks, like the combo-munching bearded slashdot types) talking about software architecture. I am seriously blown away by how useful the archi-term “program” could be, in both of these new virtual “architectures”… it gets confusing cuz there is probably no way to detangle the meanings and connotations of the word “program”, as regards computers and so forth, if you happen to be a serious geek. hrm. but I digress.

so yeah data. if you let the data speak for itself, you’re golden. if you try to complicate it with your big aesthetic ideas, you might fuck it all up badly. is this just another facet in the swirling maelstrom of navelgazery that is the postmodern malaise? you betcha. but can it be used for good, and not evil? hells yeah. I wonder if venturi/scottbrown had any idea that their idea of the “duck” would win out against the decorated shed in the fantastic new virtual universe… maybe I would know for sure if I read more books by them and their contemporaries, instead of compulsively blogging up every idea that happens into my head while walking down the motherfucking street and/or reading a magazine article. but I am nothing if not naive, yo, and damn proud.

ok now I’m going to watch “bring me the head of alfredo garcia”. enough of this babble. love ya.

-fish

here are some situations I can think of where illegally downloading stuff is morally OK, nondetrimental, and probably good for someones’ business, too:

• I purchase “home video office” from bleep. my decision to buy is predicated solely on some random blogger’s comparison of the music to boards of canada. excitedly, I share the unprotected mp3’s with laura. later, laura tells me that home video office is playing a show in new york, which we attend. had I not shared the mp3s, home video office would be less rich by the price of 2 concert tickets, as well as the exposure generated by the entire exchange, which is hard to value.
• “spider-man 2” hits the theatres. having legally watched a legitimate, MPAA-endorsed DVD copy of the original “spider-man”, I download and watch a DivX copy of the first movie before going out to see the second. as such I am able to formulate a far more cogent analysis of the “spider-man” franchise when the topic comes up in conversation. without this resource, “spider-man 2” would be just another summer hollywood hit, but now the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (as it were) and my conversation about it reflects this.
• I download and watch the movie “spirited away”, on a whim, knowing nothing about it. after watching the horribly compressed DivX file, I am moved to near tears (fo’reals, don’t laugh, you philistines) and as such I endeavor to legally acquire the movie, as well as the soundtrack and a book about it. despite this, I do hold onto the downloaded copy, as there is a subtle difference in the subtitle translation in this copy that I find rather poignant*. the whole thing sets me off on a miyazaki kick.
• I purchase and read the book “battle royale” after downloading the film of the same name. to this day, this film remains legally unavailable in america, four years after its initial release.
• unable to track down my old cd copy of the cure’s “mixed up” compilation, I download a copy in advance of the curiosa festival, so I can better sing along to “lullaby” on the off chance that the band endeavors to play it.

I felt like listing these examples cuz everything I read online about copyright debates seems to be oddly decontextualized. most people seem content to talk about the actual stuff being downloaded in the abstract. that’s probably where a lot of the problems in the debate come from. so yeah not like all this is anything new or earthshattering or anything like that… I just thought I’d pitch in my contextual two cents. yaaaar.

-fish

continuing with the summer stupidity theme, I recently gave up trying to get old kurosawa and jim jarmoush movies online and downloaded the original “spider man”, “gladiator”, “star wars episode IV”, “beverly hills cop 1”, and some ridiculous-looking action movie by the guy who directed “battle royale”. you just can’t stop me at all whatsoever, I’m telling you, I’m a single-digit-IQ juggernaut on the divx player.

tonight: a party, at yogi’s. I am positive that this will drown me in booze and put me on the dancefloor, as kevin and my dear associate ATW will be rotating records. hooboy, yes.

and so it goes. you, too, should enjoy yourself. the weather’s quite nice actually, when you peel yr face off the screen. wordup.

-fish

when you walk east on NY route 2 from downtown troy, the road surges uphill sharply. the city abruptly segues into this odd sort of mix of rural and urban. on your right, as you walk up the hill towards vermont, are rolling hills with tufts of forest on them. maybe 12 or so meters of grass separate the edge of the forests from the road, which turns here and there as it heads uphill.

in the winter, when the forest is denuded, you can see the skeletal remnants of foundations lacing these hills. it looks like there used to be some kind of fortress or something there. on the shortest day of the year last december, the sun shone gorgeously, and I went walking up there with boards of canada on my headfones. I kept glancing over my shoulder, cuz in the warmer months the area is a popular place to purchase and/or smoke crack, but I was alone that time.

I’ve lived in troy for two and a half years, but I’d only just noticed the fortress remnants this past winter. I asked my friends about this, but most of them hadn’t seen it either (although most of them were quite piqued and suggested that we go explore it with cameras and such). I realized I probably hadn’t seen the thing because prior to this winter, I was too busy driving past it. but what with finally selling my car this past october, I got to walking all over the place, and seeing stuff at the side of the road at a far slower place.

and so yeah as I was walking thusly I couldn’t help thinking of peter bilak’s fantastic academic justification for a typeface that, when viewed at rest, is basically a pile of incomprehendable nonsense but looks dandy at highway speeds. that typeface, and that wacky self-assembling MoMA QNS rooftop sign, suggest to me a potentially good design salve against the more problematic aspects of robert moses’ car fetish, and the similar autophilic trends of the past century that arguably fucked up a lot of shit: careful consideration of how fast people are actually moving.

I’m no expert, fo’real. and while yeah I’d like to dumpster cars and hole up in the west village like anyone else, it would seem that they are in fact here to stay. so. in shit like this design, by a Brian Strawn and a Karla Sierralta (you have to scroll a bit), looks all well and good here with a fixed viewpoint. but how’s it look from behind the wheel on that long, slightly curved boulevard depicted there in the front? I dunno. it’s like how corbusier’s megatowers all looked hot cuz he made very hot line drawings of all them, with the line-drawing happy humans all smiley and ne’er a cloud in the sky.

so yeah that’s some shit to think about next time I’m stuck in a stinky greyhound bus, or some shit like that. now that I don’t have a car I’m way more sensitive to that shit, how about that? that’s my little silver-lining reward for being forced to walk everywhere, and having no choice but to order any semi-decent food I want off the internet. word all that. anyway yeah.

-fish

ps. if I completely missed the boat on this stuff and there is already like 10 tons of writing, research etc. on the subject then feel free to stick me in a dunce cap and point me at it, yeahyeah, I like it like that.

pps. IF YOU LIVE IN NEW YORK GO TO HOW TO KICK PEOPLE TONIGHT INSTEAD OF SPIDERMAN 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! yes!

man, apple computer. you crazy guys, with your 30 inch monster flatscreens. generally I try to avoid breaking down and succumb to pure, unadulterated, idiot consumerism, but in this case I can do nothing else but pant and exclaim, “I WANT ONE.” cuz I do. want one, that is. and indulge me this one other bit of technowankishness, too: I’m kind of secretly glad they ripped off konfabulator, cuz that program always pissed me off… they make it temptingly easy to make mini-apps with XML and javascript, but then make you buy the APP FRAMEWORK ITSELF. that’s retarded. if they’d given that away for free and sold their good plugins, that might’ve been hot. but who wants to shell out bucks just to geekily noodle around? plus the konfabulator guy is a big fat “look and feel” crook himself, apparently.

ahaha, computers, yeah, I’ve heard of them.

I miss how when I lived in new york, the first thing I could say to most anyone was “where do you live?” and have that spark off the inevitable (yet tantalizing!) conversation about neighborhoods, places to eat, relative subway stop/line merits and metrics, horror/success stories with fiendish/amazing landlords/real estate agents, and the like. now alls I have to say is “upstate” to get the wrinkled-nosed scowl. it ain’t fair. sometimes, if I’m lucky, I can jump into the “where do you live?” discussion, armed with the pearls of wisdom gleaned from my copy of “new york NFT” and such, without telling people where I actually live. but that’s kind of duplicitous, no? it would be nice to live in new york again, fo’reals.

you know what else sucks? stomachs. they’re so stupid. you keep shoveling food into them, but noooooo, they’re completely voided a few hours later. I hate stomachs. they’re dumb.

right so yeah. off to write a webapp framework thing in java. cuz sometimes your brain is so fried you just can’t design anything worth a damn, and hey sometimes it’s sort of nice to monkey out and hunch over a text editor for 10+ hours, really. really!

-fish

you know what’s kind of terrifying? ok I’ll tell you. I learned pretty much everything I know about this thing I do, this thing I affectionately call “design”, by completely fucking up. I’d make ugly shit untill something pretty happened. put enough drop shadows on bank gothic, and you’re bound to get bored and try something else, right?? hahaha. but no fo’reals. apple-Z and cheaply abundant paper have gorgeously facilitated my entire education, thus far.

same with all the code shit too. worst I could do with that would be to completely fuck up my computer. I never succeded in this to the extent of trashing the hard drive, even… the worst it got was watching the OS install status bars, one more time. most times the worst I’d get would be the frustration of websearching for some pithy error message, and that’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things.

but I guess maybe there’s a reason I didn’t get into, say, sculpture, or other abundantly physical modes of aesthetic creation. no apple-Z… fucking up with that some of that shit can actually be costly, in terms of money and/or fingers. even with the design, there was some of that. I did learn the hard way with the x-acto and I have the scars to prove it. thank god I never did any oxyacetylene welding.

and now, tho, I want to go to school for URBAN DESIGN. and then eventually LAW. geez. I am going to have to retrofit large parts of my autoeducational processes, aren’t I?? I’m sure the schools for these respective professions are cleverly designed to pummel you in such a way that fucking up is out of the question, so if I can do that, maybe it’s reasonable to assume that I won’t make a city that devolves into cannibalism, or what have you. but what if I lack the disposition for that sort of thing in the first place??? I dunno.

the terrifying thought is that I’ve grown up warped in such a way where alls I can do is use a computer, which would be fantastically sad. cuz, let’s face it: we live in the world. when we all live in computers, I might reëvaluate my position on this matter, but for now computers can sorta kinda eat a dick, in many key respects. yes.

ok yeah. all this speculation may or may not be retarded, cuz I’ve been up all night programming max/msp. did you know that despite its finer points, max/msp makes reading and manipulating simple ascii text files unnecessarily complex and stupid? well now you do. ok yeah. maybe some coffee will fix me. I’ll go have some. word to moms.

-fish