...tend to produce interesting conversations. I met the Monkey somewhere around 8pm. It was dark, but we had a business deal to conduct. The transaction lasted an hour under minimal light, and all I was wearing was a t-shirt and shorts, but I wasn't even remotely cold.
For, my dearest audience, we are philosophers.
An unusual kind, mind you. But the following was reasoned:
Essays suck. They distract you from more life-enriching experiences. Blogging is better. You can do it at your own pace.
Our personal narratives can be altered with relative ease. When said narratives are entwined, intervention can be interesting (if experimental). It must just be pointed out that the intervener would need to possess a strong code of ethics for any of this to be morally permissible. It is known that I argue more for moral relativity, which is why I cannot truly claim another's behaviour as wrong if I do not have certain proof that said behaviour is causing inefficiency in the human project. In the end, we are story-tellers masquerading as journalists (or philosophers even, perhaps?), the Raoul Dukes of the twenty-eleven counterculture project.
In case you're wondering why I say essays suck and then apparently write myself one, this is what I am studying for something claiming itself to be an academic essasy. It's an excerpt from my dear friend Thomas Elsaesser,
After having argued that the New German Cinema, despite its allegiance to the Autorenfilm, did not function according to an ideology of self-expression, this chapter will try to show that it did: that self-expression as self-representation profoundly marked many of the films themselves, making them allegories of their own problematic existence, endlessly examining the question of what is cinema, and what can films produced in such a context, be 'about' except the conditions of their own impossibility?... Nothing is more consistent than the parables one finds of the subsidy system, the direct thematisations and indirect representations of its impact and paradoxes.
...w t f? I know I am given to sesquipedalian loquaciousness (see http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SesquipedalianLoquaciousness) at times, but This, dearest audience, is a mouthful I can barely understand. And now I have to study it. FML.
One more thing: I don't pay That much attention to politics, compared to some, but I would like to say, quite laconically (a new style for me perhaps? We'll see) that as a performer, Julius is perfectly within his rights to sing songs and I do wish that right had not been taken from him, for this dealt a blow to freedom of speech. Even if I disagree with the content of his songs (which I most assuredly do) I just see the problem: Now it is up to judges to decide, subjectively, what hate speech is. And they have a stupidly large amount of power to decide that, given their clearly subjective views! So now there is going to be trouble. I urge people to write discursive message and disseminate them widely in order to educate people on the nuances of the system. For only then can they ever learn to promote efficiency in the best way possible, given the proliferation of the system.
Even if you don't agree that my approach of achieving increased efficiency is the best one, you should surely concede that efficiency is what the human race deserves.
And if you don't, you are free to disagree with me. That is your right.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Friday, September 23, 2011
Pure randomness
As I sit in the Mendi Labs (or more colloquially, the Dungeon) this morning, with nothing currently else to do (can you believe that) I've decided to make a couple of rather laconic, random points about my observations.
Hard drive space is relative. When we get a new hard drive we never think we'll use up all of it, but we do. It's because we think in terms of how much space we have available and tend to use compression, especially lossless and also pure formats, and create an entire catalogue if we wish, with double redundancy. That's how I manage to use up about 75% of my 4.5 TB. In fact 75% is a reasonably stable point at which you start thinking about space.
Not mine but apparently the best predictor of pro-weed opinions is pro-premarital sex opinions.
You can find inspiration in anything if you know where to look.
Write.
The world is a pretty ridiculous place. Gone are the illusions of childhood in which the world is orderly and contained, a closed-loop as it were. The place is completely dysfunctional.
Aspiehood brings a surprising sense of egotism. how can we make this a good thing? I only started noticing the world around me at about 13 or 14, as in becoming really cognisant of its multiplicitous, hypercomplex nature.
The internet would always emerge, given sufficient advancement in technology. The military would never be able to suppress it (or indeed any technology) forever. The internet will continue expanding as long as computers exist. For then there will be hard drive space (secondary storage) and someone else, somehow, somewhere, will be able to access it in virtual form, but that delivers, in effect, a perfect digital copy to the receiver. The internet will always be rebuilt.
And that is awesome.
EDIT:
I've been thinking about technology a lot lately, and how systems often seem to be let down thanks to bottlenecking somewhere. That leads me to think about bandwidth limits on broadband networks.
<30 minutes pass>
I've just spent the last half hour trying to find out UCT's bandwidth backbone. The best I have managed to infer is that it is currently 1 Gbps and that it may be updated at the end of the year. Some campuses are subdivided, I think Hiddingh is allowed 20 Mbps for example. But with four thousand plus connection nodes, and given that perhaps 60% of nodes could theoretically be using it simultaneously, you have, say, 2400 users. The resulting bandwidth is still 833 Kbps, not bad at all for peak usage of a connection in THIS goddamn country.
I love how everything is a metagame inside my head.
I'm very interested in days and their length and sunlight hours and equinoxes and other weather intricacies like the midnight sun, and how large a degree is in which part of the world.
It links to my love of temporal systems and understanding them.. how long does an ant live? Is its time of life related to how long it sleeps? As humans, we may sleep 8 hours at a time, given a standard life of 72 years, that's 631 152 hours, so each sleep might be 1/78894th of your life (0.00001%). A male ant lives, say, 3 weeks. For it then, each sleep would last 18 seconds, and their idea of a day would be 54 seconds, and a single calendar day would feel like 3 and a half years to us.
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to celebrate New Years 2012 on 1 January 2012 at 18:00 - that is only when 2012 actually begins. Because a year is actually 365.25 days.
INTERSPERSED EDIT (or META-EDIT): Another thing spoken about is the true realisation of what capitalism is really doing. My contention is such: The World Bank, IMF and WTO have well and truly fucked Africa up. Truly and absolutely. Consider this for a moment: How can the financial system, the capitalist system have ANY legitimacy if IT OWES MORE MONEY THAN IT HAS??? Please for the love of god can someone actually fucking realise that this is solid proof that the capitalist system has NO basis in real money and value, BECAUSE OWING MORE THAN WHAT EXISTS violates the zero sum game required for economics to have ANY parity whatsoever! Now, back to Africa. I hold the extremely firm contention that Africa will NEVER be OK under the capitalist system, and indeed will only get worse. And I say that Africa is a good place to start the revolution. We are less indoctrinated in capitalism. (That said, we will have to work hard to explain that we are not proposing communism or state socialism either, as those are just as bad). If you think about it, the only more monstrous thing that the colonial powers could do than massacre millions of Africans is reduce hundreds of millions to starvation and suffering for generations to come. People knew this was going to happen since the mid 1800s if not earlier. YOU FUCKING ECONOMY-IMPOSING PIGS. If anyone deserves hell, it's the likes of you.
Now imagine talking about all of this in the space of half an hour on a spring afternoon.
ADHD indeed.
Hard drive space is relative. When we get a new hard drive we never think we'll use up all of it, but we do. It's because we think in terms of how much space we have available and tend to use compression, especially lossless and also pure formats, and create an entire catalogue if we wish, with double redundancy. That's how I manage to use up about 75% of my 4.5 TB. In fact 75% is a reasonably stable point at which you start thinking about space.
Not mine but apparently the best predictor of pro-weed opinions is pro-premarital sex opinions.
You can find inspiration in anything if you know where to look.
Write.
The world is a pretty ridiculous place. Gone are the illusions of childhood in which the world is orderly and contained, a closed-loop as it were. The place is completely dysfunctional.
Aspiehood brings a surprising sense of egotism. how can we make this a good thing? I only started noticing the world around me at about 13 or 14, as in becoming really cognisant of its multiplicitous, hypercomplex nature.
The internet would always emerge, given sufficient advancement in technology. The military would never be able to suppress it (or indeed any technology) forever. The internet will continue expanding as long as computers exist. For then there will be hard drive space (secondary storage) and someone else, somehow, somewhere, will be able to access it in virtual form, but that delivers, in effect, a perfect digital copy to the receiver. The internet will always be rebuilt.
And that is awesome.
EDIT:
I've been thinking about technology a lot lately, and how systems often seem to be let down thanks to bottlenecking somewhere. That leads me to think about bandwidth limits on broadband networks.
<30 minutes pass>
I've just spent the last half hour trying to find out UCT's bandwidth backbone. The best I have managed to infer is that it is currently 1 Gbps and that it may be updated at the end of the year. Some campuses are subdivided, I think Hiddingh is allowed 20 Mbps for example. But with four thousand plus connection nodes, and given that perhaps 60% of nodes could theoretically be using it simultaneously, you have, say, 2400 users. The resulting bandwidth is still 833 Kbps, not bad at all for peak usage of a connection in THIS goddamn country.
I love how everything is a metagame inside my head.
I'm very interested in days and their length and sunlight hours and equinoxes and other weather intricacies like the midnight sun, and how large a degree is in which part of the world.
It links to my love of temporal systems and understanding them.. how long does an ant live? Is its time of life related to how long it sleeps? As humans, we may sleep 8 hours at a time, given a standard life of 72 years, that's 631 152 hours, so each sleep might be 1/78894th of your life (0.00001%). A male ant lives, say, 3 weeks. For it then, each sleep would last 18 seconds, and their idea of a day would be 54 seconds, and a single calendar day would feel like 3 and a half years to us.
Speaking of which, I think I'm going to celebrate New Years 2012 on 1 January 2012 at 18:00 - that is only when 2012 actually begins. Because a year is actually 365.25 days.
INTERSPERSED EDIT (or META-EDIT): Another thing spoken about is the true realisation of what capitalism is really doing. My contention is such: The World Bank, IMF and WTO have well and truly fucked Africa up. Truly and absolutely. Consider this for a moment: How can the financial system, the capitalist system have ANY legitimacy if IT OWES MORE MONEY THAN IT HAS??? Please for the love of god can someone actually fucking realise that this is solid proof that the capitalist system has NO basis in real money and value, BECAUSE OWING MORE THAN WHAT EXISTS violates the zero sum game required for economics to have ANY parity whatsoever! Now, back to Africa. I hold the extremely firm contention that Africa will NEVER be OK under the capitalist system, and indeed will only get worse. And I say that Africa is a good place to start the revolution. We are less indoctrinated in capitalism. (That said, we will have to work hard to explain that we are not proposing communism or state socialism either, as those are just as bad). If you think about it, the only more monstrous thing that the colonial powers could do than massacre millions of Africans is reduce hundreds of millions to starvation and suffering for generations to come. People knew this was going to happen since the mid 1800s if not earlier. YOU FUCKING ECONOMY-IMPOSING PIGS. If anyone deserves hell, it's the likes of you.
Now imagine talking about all of this in the space of half an hour on a spring afternoon.
ADHD indeed.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
I want to be a part of it
But the question is, do you need to?
Yes, that's right, I started a blog without an introduction. Whatever. Here's the lowdown: While I copy 108 GB of data from the laboratory computer to the external hard drive, I have a question for all of you. Why would you try, so hard, to be a part of something, anything, when the actual truth is that you are already a part of everything?
Here's how I see it. Human beings around are always trying to plug into some sort of collective: their country (patriotism), their race, their sexual orientation, their gender, their sports team, their occupation. The problem with all of these systems is that they are divisive: they, by definitition, include some and exclude others. Now do you see why this is ridiculous? To want to belong to a collective in order to EXCLUDE? The whole point of humanity is to INCLUDE, to realise that you are an autonomous, unique, beautiful expression of a whole that encompasses all of consciousness! Of a singular being that lives through us all.
This is a reason power has to go. No people deserve the power to make decisions for other people. Everyone deserves to be educated to a level in which they truly can make decisions for THEMSELVES. That would be our human rights fulfilled.
So the simple truth is that you are ALREADY a part of it all. The greater cosmic simulacrum would not be the same without you.
So make it count.
Yes, that's right, I started a blog without an introduction. Whatever. Here's the lowdown: While I copy 108 GB of data from the laboratory computer to the external hard drive, I have a question for all of you. Why would you try, so hard, to be a part of something, anything, when the actual truth is that you are already a part of everything?
Here's how I see it. Human beings around are always trying to plug into some sort of collective: their country (patriotism), their race, their sexual orientation, their gender, their sports team, their occupation. The problem with all of these systems is that they are divisive: they, by definitition, include some and exclude others. Now do you see why this is ridiculous? To want to belong to a collective in order to EXCLUDE? The whole point of humanity is to INCLUDE, to realise that you are an autonomous, unique, beautiful expression of a whole that encompasses all of consciousness! Of a singular being that lives through us all.
This is a reason power has to go. No people deserve the power to make decisions for other people. Everyone deserves to be educated to a level in which they truly can make decisions for THEMSELVES. That would be our human rights fulfilled.
So the simple truth is that you are ALREADY a part of it all. The greater cosmic simulacrum would not be the same without you.
So make it count.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Insight
Yes, I'm back. You may now all perform the customary sharp intake of breath warranted by this sudden turn of events.
Pardon my theatrics. But I have an idea for you (or is it my idea anyway?). That is, are the thoughts that you have, creative or logical (or perhaps even illogical, hopefully not too often or else I'm not getting through to my intended audience, truly yours to begin with?
From whence exactly do we, as human beings, ostensibly individuals, truly glean ideas? Do they come from your brain? What inspires them? Or did they exist elsewhere and your brain just absorbs them, crediting the individual that is you with the idea? As far as capitalists are concerned, it makes sense to credit individuals with ideas, insights and creative works, so that corporations may come and exploit such people under the banner of intellectual property rights, of course. But my question to you is as follows: Are these ideas manifestations of entirely individual thought processes?
Naturally, we all gain our inspiration from the world and our subjective experience of it. But some of us forget how much we owe to it for providing us with these thoughts and ideas. Instead we exploit or allow others to exploit these ideas for personal gain. And most of us do so not greedily and selfishly,but rather, in accordance with the system requiring us to earn money to surivive, just to make our survival that much more likely and comfortable - even at the cost of the free use of the idea.
My view, though, is that these ideas stem from the collective consciousness and that when you chance upon them, you should be grateful, and you owe it to the collective consciousness to express these. For you, with your free will, have a unique ability to express it, in a way no-one else can. The ideal, then, is for any ideas to be freely disseminated so that they can be enhanced further by other 'individual' aspects of the collective consciousness - improved, and then perfected. For that is all I believe we are, in the end, a unique aspect of this unknowable, ethereal substance we call consciousness.
In effect, I believe that what you are reading right now, in a blog typed by Dave Dornbrack, is an idea that is manifest in the consciousness itself, and that I am merely expressing this idea, using my gift of language, this particular variety that is known as English, to disseminate across the interwebs. All I am doing is increasing the palpability of a preexisting, if dissolute cogntion.
Something to consider: Sometimes, in a certain species, if enough individuals learn a behaviour, it can become instinctual to the rest of the species without ever being taught.
Make of that what you will.
Pardon my theatrics. But I have an idea for you (or is it my idea anyway?). That is, are the thoughts that you have, creative or logical (or perhaps even illogical, hopefully not too often or else I'm not getting through to my intended audience, truly yours to begin with?
From whence exactly do we, as human beings, ostensibly individuals, truly glean ideas? Do they come from your brain? What inspires them? Or did they exist elsewhere and your brain just absorbs them, crediting the individual that is you with the idea? As far as capitalists are concerned, it makes sense to credit individuals with ideas, insights and creative works, so that corporations may come and exploit such people under the banner of intellectual property rights, of course. But my question to you is as follows: Are these ideas manifestations of entirely individual thought processes?
Naturally, we all gain our inspiration from the world and our subjective experience of it. But some of us forget how much we owe to it for providing us with these thoughts and ideas. Instead we exploit or allow others to exploit these ideas for personal gain. And most of us do so not greedily and selfishly,but rather, in accordance with the system requiring us to earn money to surivive, just to make our survival that much more likely and comfortable - even at the cost of the free use of the idea.
My view, though, is that these ideas stem from the collective consciousness and that when you chance upon them, you should be grateful, and you owe it to the collective consciousness to express these. For you, with your free will, have a unique ability to express it, in a way no-one else can. The ideal, then, is for any ideas to be freely disseminated so that they can be enhanced further by other 'individual' aspects of the collective consciousness - improved, and then perfected. For that is all I believe we are, in the end, a unique aspect of this unknowable, ethereal substance we call consciousness.
In effect, I believe that what you are reading right now, in a blog typed by Dave Dornbrack, is an idea that is manifest in the consciousness itself, and that I am merely expressing this idea, using my gift of language, this particular variety that is known as English, to disseminate across the interwebs. All I am doing is increasing the palpability of a preexisting, if dissolute cogntion.
Something to consider: Sometimes, in a certain species, if enough individuals learn a behaviour, it can become instinctual to the rest of the species without ever being taught.
Make of that what you will.
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