Pseudo_Intellectual's New Writeups

July 28, 2007 (log)

2007-07-29T21:41:32Z

Forget about meeting people at a festival, which only happens when you stop moving and bump into the first person you know (target size doubled, everyone else you have ever known will exponentially gravitate into the dense nucleus of strange-to-each-other-ers); if you're serious about running into remote acquaintances and people that you only ever met once five years ago, you accomplish this by leaving the festival and walking counter to the traffic flow. Face to face, you explain endlessly (to people you only know just well enough to ask "where do I know you from?") that you are aware that you are proceeding in the opposite direction from the Lantern Festival. Yes, yes, you live near my destination on one end of this street and are proceeding toward your destination, which is near my home at the other end of this street. I have already had this conversation five times in the past ten minutes!

Lantern Festivals, despite the sense you may get at the park, are not in fact to everyone's taste.…

The Excellent and Most Lamentable Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (thing)

2004-02-02T17:41:49Z

.-~' Been Much Play'd to Great Amusement `~-.

One Robin Johnson, among whatever other miscellaneous and sundry accomplishments he may have attained (self-described at his homepage as scientist, artist, clown, slob, weirdo, atheist, surrealist, technocrat, malcontent, actor, web programmer, snappy dresser, unstable genius, former dot-com wonder boy turned secretary's secretary's secretary, and all round great person), enjoys the highly dubious distinction of being the only person (likely a title that will not be challenged for some time) to compose and program an entire InfoCom-style text game based on a query (his own) to the UseNet Oracle, whose salient bits are alluded to in this node's title. (Hurry up and be the first to adapt your own…

Rick Hansen (person)

2004-01-20T22:22:04Z

If you ask me about three national athletic heroes of my Canadian childhood, I will tell you of Ben Johnson, who ran 100 metres at the 1988 Seoul Olympics on borrowed legs; I will tell you of Terry Fox, who ran halfway (5,373 km) across the second-largest country in the world on one leg; and I will tell you of Rick Hansen, who circumnavigated the globe (40 thousand 72 km; 34 countries on 4 continents) on no legs. (My countrymen-peers may well amend mutterings about the traitorous 1988 defection of Wayne Gretzky from the Edmonton Oilers to the L.A. Kings...)

Any way you look at it, 1988 was a hope-deflating year, but considering the unreal heights reached the previous year with the conclusion of Hansen's Man in Motion¹ tour (a fitting coda to Vancouver's transportation-themed Expo '86 the year before that but, uh, that's another node) a grounding was perhaps inevitable. I still…

Unsilent Night (idea)

2003-12-25T05:02:20Z

Composer Phil Kline, co-founder of Jim Jarmusch's '80s art-punk band the Del-Byzanteens, likes many things about traditional Christmas music: peals of bells, the massed harmonies of choirs, and the promenading peregrinations of caroling. But hold the phone! He's also a big fan of Glenn Branca's sound mass experiments and the notorious phasing tape-loop techniques of Steve Reich and Brian Eno. How to reconcile one of our oldest and most well-established Western musical traditions with one of our youngest and most poorly-understood?

Conceptually evoking John Cage's earlier 1951 Imaginary Landscape No. 4 and his 1956 Radio Music (or, if you prefer, the Flaming Lips' later quadraphonic 1997 album Zaireeka), beginning in 1990 Kline began producing works for groups of portable audiotape cassette players (or, as you might recall them, "boom boxes" and "ghetto blasters)"), foregoing with Cage and Eno's off-and-on preoccupation with indeterminacies and…

gursha (thing)

2003-10-27T11:20:57Z

If this has remained unmentioned for the five years I've been here, it's a clear indication none of us have been eating enough of the right kinds of food -- or in the right style.

Too often the western tradition of dining has left the food experience a relationship of sterile interplay strictly between fork and mouth, as though we are so afraid of coming into contact with and really engaging the food we are about to ingest we cannot bring ourselves to touch it with our fingers. Picnicking removes the abstraction of cold metal from the equation and leaves nothing but the desired food to be conveyed between hand and mouth; gursha is the final breakdown of a rigid implementation of notions of personal space preventing eating from becoming a fully and truly social enterprise.

Beneath a Coptic illustration of a fellowship of thirteen enjoying themselves in a similar scene, a colossal communal platter arrives on the basket-woven table you share with a handful of close…

homophone (idea)

2003-08-13T20:03:35Z

Lying half-awake in bed, gradually growing aware of the sensation of the cat chewing on my toes, a miasmic thought bubbles deep and meaningfully up out of the murky bog that recent events here have made of my brain and, ultimately, the will'o'the wisp stinks up the database with its sulfur and methane:

Is it possible to copyright permut(at)ed representations of phonemes (which is to say, sounds and syllables expressed equivalently in perhaps unconventional ways)?

I begin with a seemingly non sequitur flash out of left field, of the hacks who wrung the last few drops out of Napster by ROT-13ing their filenames -- for while lawyers were only too happy to serve subpoenas to anyone caught offering Metallica - Master of Puppets it would be quite some time until their nets were cast wide enough to ensnare Zrgnyyvpn - Znfgre bs Chccrgf, attaining a species of…