Archive for March, 2011
Numbers in decline
The number of hits per day has actually decreased since I started posting. Then again if post views reveal anything, no one actually reads what I write anyways.
Fucking the id
Is sexuality stored in the id? Can we undesire the uncontrollable? There is a kinda urban legend of sexuality, that you only get one shot, once you’re one thing you’ll never be another, but i’m not so sure in the long run such advice is valid, the id fluctuates, attenuates, unravels, the id is actually cosmopolitain and loves to learn and forget. We’re not condemmed to sexualities, we merely learn to crave them.
Sorry pixie the construction of markets
In my local lotus there is a cellphone carrier that adverises iphones. Every saturday i find myself trying to come up with the desire to switch from android to the iphone.
Mac fanaticism runs deep, my dad simply didn’t buy pcs. I grew up photoshopping on macs and only switched to pcs when the linuxes i experimented with as a teenager solidifed first into servers and second into valiant open source laptops. Open source has yet to nail the desktop platform, my netbook’s ubuntu is awfull, but apple has nailed the phone.
There is little contestation that apple’s product is superior to google’s in a variety of ways. In the desktop wars apple’s major flaw was software, this time they have more of it in spades. Android in fact acts a lot like windows. My two month old phone has to force quit regularly, a feature which i find unacceptable in phones. The hurly burly of carriers and the failures of phone companies to keep android up to date simply compound the already vast hardware problems google’s more open strategy entails, but i still don’t want the iphone.
Consumer markets have proven harder to quantify than solar systems. How consumers decide, and the flurry of subjectivites that decide the buy or not buy binary the cash register records, is not a problem mathematics was made to handle. The dismal science struggles to represent subjectivity accurately. It is rather in anthropolgy’s gaze that the consumer is better summarized. For my father for instance the iphone is the premeire choice, he owns two plus his clinic has several ipads. I can’t help, but feel his has some generalitional commraderie with wozinak/jobs too.
I grew up in the midst of this whole wired / mondo 2000 technolust thing. My technoloyy decissions are often based around an implicit understanding that others like me are shaping the market. We think of our decissions at the technological cash register as votes. The reason i went with android was simply that google’s clout is huge, their wuffie isn’t as edgie as apple’s, and simply put i don’t want apple to dominate the market. It frustrates me that my art house friend, the little apple logo is now everywhere. I teach children in a second world country, they can afford a used iphone now. If there was a smaller more obscure cellular os, i would probably support it… the only problem is there already is a smaller better cellular os it’s called web os.
Palm’s product i’m not terribly familair with. I had one if their schedulers in the nineties, but that’s about it. Palm’s web os supports flash and html5 (android supports flash, iphone html5). It has a great user interface and the budget model is called the pixie… the later is a major selling point for me. I didn’t choose palm though because i simply didn’t think they would make it against the iphone. In other words the collective decission i saw my pack making was to construct google as apple’s rival in lieu of a better phone. As my browser quits and my hardware fails and it feels like i’m using windows again i think i might have been better off away from the pack just my pixie and me… against THE WORLD!!!
Addictions
I can not recall the first time I ate at McDonalds. I remember my stepsister describing it as mickie dees and my Dad desperately trying to avoid it. The golden arches have travelled the world, a few even exist in Bangkok now, but would anyone describe McDonalds as addictive?
The term adddiction came to my eighties self in after school programs, it was the result of deformed drug dealers, marijuana and cocaine, the large dog detective that dared you to stay off drugs, addiction was limited to chemical substances, the word could not travel outside the criminal underworld. The origins of meaning are frivilous Derrida assures us, but its funny how one definition hijacked by a Reagen drug war can become so enforced, it causes the observer to ignore other symptoms deserving of the term.
Steam is a cloud based gaming service. It sells a virtual good downloads of video games. Steam could not qualify as an addiction under my previous variant of the term, but i wouldn’t hesitate to swoop down and buy a 75% off madness sale at any minute. Steam understands that consumerism is addictive, that if a price point is terribly low, the purhase becomes more compelling, never mind that virtual goods cost almost nothing to copy. When I bought batman arkham asylum for 7 usd i actually felt ripped off when I saw the same deal the next day, part of the purchase was its exclusivity, the fact that I logged in at the right time (side note in class right now and principal of school is talking about mc hammer in thai right now). Steam is addictive, but in ways that drugs aren’t. It is immateril omnipresent, a fix is as simple as a password.
The other night, convinced I needed to do work, i took a cab home. Stuck in traffic a few blocks from my house i got out and walked and boom! In a pc bar letting my batman game download. I even have a little canvas tote bag just for my games addiction. Everyday i get home and can’t wait to put it on. Games have a stopping point though, despite how much I enjoy team fortress 2, i still can’t play more than a few rounds with out a slight case of information overload filling me with dread. I remember in college chain smoking till i vomited, i couldn’t touch marlbro lights for years afterwards.
Addiction is a midddle groud, it exists because other things keep us from getting enough. Addiction is desire’s tumor, the way pleasure makes us sick, the destructive side of joy, but it is also punishment. When we finally got to mickey dees that day, the burger stung my throat, the pepsi burned, the fries were to hot, i cried in a litte yellow booth and was scared by a horribley pleasant clown, i didn’t want to go there again, but the pain persited, and you need another fry to balance the first one.
How haunted?
I read once that Rome had a population of 1 million at its height (wikipedia reports 3.5 million as the high estimate). If you took every story set in the city, you could probably account for every citizen in the republic at its height. How many new citizens walk through words each year to the fulcrum of the Western mythos? If turned Cesear into al the manifestations of him he would be schizophreniac. And note that Cesear is present tense. We, in many ways, contain the etthnic Roman inside us, the myth perpuates the way we regulate our identities, but is this obsession mostly an American past time?
Is the use of history incredibly male?
Is the identity that history produces a strange worm inside us? Is history’s overt masculinity disclude the feminite? Is feminity produced by a different means than history? Does feminity therefore arise from a differing place?
If we check the citizens on time bridge’s those waiting their turn to be gobbled into history, it is primarily male. Women though are very visible in roman literature and especially in our casts back to that time. Women are certainly in line for the republic, but they arrive passengers in another’s vechile.
History is a great fiction. One of several memories we carry around communally. A city being rendered by the collective imaginaion in random spurts and bursts. But its archecture rattles through society unevenly, unable to conjure equality. History is perhaps the most permeble on the precepts that form ethnicity, but when accepted as is, it feels like the most ancient of things.