Friday, 2 August 2019
Thursday, 1 August 2019
Tim Kadlec - "The Ethics of Web Performance"
Interesting article describing how performance of websites, impacting users (low end devices unable to render, low bandwidth, wear and tear of battery life) is actually an ethical concern.
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2019-01-09-the-ethics-of-performance/
https://timkadlec.com/remembers/2019-01-09-the-ethics-of-performance/
Spor ft Tasha Baxter - "As I Need You"
drum'n'bass-y track, quite nice. Evocative vocals by Tasha Baxter.
Monday, 29 July 2019
Kurt Vonnegut - "Cat's Cradle"
Fun, though not over the top. Great writing, though his style becomes very familiar.
[preface, quoting Fedric Jameson in his elegy for Philip K. Dick]
"It may be the very conventionality, the inauthenticity, the formal stereotyping of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential - the logic of stereotyes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time."
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts; sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.
The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!
'The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.'
'Oh yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people.
'And Father started giggling,' Castle continued.
'He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvellous man said to me?' asked Castle.
'Nope.'
' "Son," my father said to me, "someday this will all be yours." '
'He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.'
'Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy, is he?'
'Yes,' said Castle, 'and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.'
'Good for him.'
'Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010.'
[preface, quoting Fedric Jameson in his elegy for Philip K. Dick]
"It may be the very conventionality, the inauthenticity, the formal stereotyping of Science Fiction that gives it one signal advantage over modernist high literature. The latter can show us everything about the individual psyche and its subjective experience and alienation, save the essential - the logic of stereotyes, reproductions and depersonalization in which the individual is held in our own time."
They were lovebirds. They entertained each other endlessly with little gifts; sights worth seeing out the plane window, amusing or instructive bits from things they read, random recollections of times gone by.
The people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!
'The bubonic plague. The bulldozer was stalled by corpses.'
'Oh yes. Anyway, one sleepless night I stayed up with Father while he worked. It was all we could do to find a live patient to treat. In bed after bed we found dead people.
'And Father started giggling,' Castle continued.
'He couldn't stop. He walked out into the night with his flashlight. He was still giggling. He was making the flashlight beam dance over all the dead people stacked outside. He put his hand on my head, and do you know what that marvellous man said to me?' asked Castle.
'Nope.'
' "Son," my father said to me, "someday this will all be yours." '
'He was in the S.S. for fourteen years. He was a camp physician at Auschwitz for six of those years.'
'Doing penance at the House of Hope and Mercy, is he?'
'Yes,' said Castle, 'and making great strides, too, saving lives right and left.'
'Good for him.'
'Yes. If he keeps going at his present rate, working night and day, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010.'
Jenni Fagan - "The Sunlight Pilgrims"
Nicely written dystopia about an ice age occuring in 2020 where Dylan, formerly working in his own "Babylon" cinema, retreats to a caravan that his deceased mother had bought. Some emotional development, particularly regarding Dylan and Constantine's love, felt a bit stretched, but it was a good read.
Stella imageins the brightest sun is for her, the second is for her mother and the last is for clarity, most recently lost. Her mother wants this back in their lives, but the child does not know why she should want it so much when clarity is no ally. It isn't any kind of a companion at all.
We all share twenty-two identical chomosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyoe starts out female and they stay like that for months.
- What, even Dad?
- Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.
- Mum! Can't you say penis?
- It sounds so sterile.
- Why don't they teach all of this stuff in Sex Ed?
- Gender indoctrination. It's state-imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it - the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.
Stella imageins the brightest sun is for her, the second is for her mother and the last is for clarity, most recently lost. Her mother wants this back in their lives, but the child does not know why she should want it so much when clarity is no ally. It isn't any kind of a companion at all.
We all share twenty-two identical chomosomes; the twenty-third is the sex chromosome and they don't kick in for at least ten weeks. Everyoe starts out female and they stay like that for months.
- What, even Dad?
- Even Jesus. Go tell that to the nuns. For some embryos the Y-chromosome creates testosterone and female organs change into male ones; about three months in, what starts out as a clitoris, in the XY gene, gets bigger until it becomes, you know, a dick.
- Mum! Can't you say penis?
- It sounds so sterile.
- Why don't they teach all of this stuff in Sex Ed?
- Gender indoctrination. It's state-imposed. The male body still holds the memory of it - the line below a scrotum is called a raphe line, and without it you'd have a vagina; every embryo has an opening at the genitals and it becomes labia and vagina or, when male hormones kick in, the tissue fuses together and it leaves a scar, which is the raphe line.
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