n: vb: the spice of imagination
My bed swallows me when I am alone in it. Buried in multiple blankets and small
avalanche piles of throw pillows, red and
gold and gray, I wake tangled, lost, cradled in the absence of other days,
sensitive only to the books stacked at my feet,
the cats stretched, stretching, asleep. I take up less of the bed than they do,
the pages, essays, non-fiction, and novels,
the small bundles of sinew, bone, and warm black fur.
flight patterns from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.
There is a fury and and sadness inside that I cannot express., by Classically Liberal:
I want to grab our “society” by the shoulders, shake it violently, and scream at the top of my voice: “Don’t you fucking understand what you are doing? How can you let this happen? How can you demand that it happen?”
Here is the photo. I’ve looked at it again. I can’t look at it and type at the same time, it is too upsetting. This boy is one of the many kids that our society says are sex offenders. The interfering politicans, the would-be Nannies, do-gooders and passed ill-conceived laws to protect our young, and instead, they are devouring the young and sacrificing them to the god of safety.
What was once considering a normal rite of passage, typical curiosity that the newly sexualized young have about themselves, their bodies, and the bodies of others, has become a heinous crime. Not long ago a curious adolescent or child, caught exploring, or playing doctor in the back yard, was given a talking-to, sent to bed early, and warned to not do it again—a warning most heeded for at least another few years, after which time warnings were useless. Today, it has been criminalized, and criminalized in a way far exceeding crimes of violence. A youth who has sex with another youth, even if voluntary, could well face legal sentences far worse than if they had killed their friend.
Also of note, this follow up post, A partial listing of our material on teens, sex offending, and the infamous registries, which offers proofs of evidence to the substantial minority attempting to defend these atrocious laws.
Did your most recent entry have media in it? Did you find it had changed?
Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted.
Although touching aliens will cause the player to lose the game, and killing aliens awards points, the aliens will never actually fire at the player. This calls into question the player’s mission, which is never explicitly stated, only hinted at through classic game mechanics. Is the player supposed to be an aggressor? Or merely an observer, traversing through a dangerous land?
Why do we assume that because we are given a weapon an awarded for using it, that doing so is right?
By way of exploring what it means to kill in a video-game, Lose/Lose broaches bigger questions. As technology grows, our understanding of it diminishes, yet, at the same time, it becomes increasingly important in our lives. At what point does our virtual data become as important to us as physical possessions? If we have reached that point already, what real objects do we value less than our data? What implications does trusting something so important to something we understand so poorly have?
via Doug:
The “second power” is the square of a number.
The “third power” is the cube of a number.But what of the EIGHTH power? What’s that called?
That is called the Zenzizenzizenzic.
Zenzizenzizenzic! Zenzizenzizenzic! Zenzizenzizenzic!
We saw them through the late night window of a junk vintage shop, wandering out on a Friday looking for thumbtacks, an accidental discovery of a commercial zone corner a block away from our apartment, (a doughnut shop, a corner store, a bar, a chic asian cocktail lounge), six brushed industrial metal letters a foot high, as silver and kind as clean water, so smooth fingers might mistake them for soft, B E A U T Y.
Fourty five dollars said the bearded man in the shop, the next afternoon when we asked. We’ll think about it, we said, we’ll be back. We liked him, his enthusiasm, his pleased surprise at our esoteric knowledge of old, strange parts. The rest of the shop was trash, (minus an eau de nil electroshock machine and a modern, colourful painting of a horse made of scissors), all broken furniture and the sort of costume jewelry even hipsters wouldn’t wear. Piles stacked on other piles, used newspaper messy, nothing to invite a body in to dig.
Fourty five dollars, he said, and the next day we paid it. Sunday on our way to somewhere else, not quite almost running late. Fourty five dollars and we brought our own bag. (They sounded like a factory accident as they rubbed together, like the foley for a train crash, unexpected and intense.) Soon the letters will go above the bed, a literary headboard, both statement and fact, to remind us who we are and what we’re after, our us-against-them cure for the world.
And then, unexpected, the smell of cigarettes mixed with blood, as if you are beneath my window, about to throw a stone.
My belly hollows, my already pale emotions dissipate. I am caught in the intimate, unkind glare of my own sharp headlights, memories of what we’ve known, emptied, wondering when change is going to come, when I will finally begin to be free.
Given my now regular eight hours on the bus every weekend, I’ve been reading more books a week than I have in years, (since I banned myself from libraries), as I swallow two or three whole each way. The last book I finished, China Tom Miéville’s the city & the city, was strange and fascinating, less for the content and more for how political it made me feel, how much I innately disagreed with the premise of the strange place he brilliantly created for his setting, a city that legally counts itself as two cities, invisible to each other through the sheer power of opinion, where your neighbor isn’t your neighbor unless you agree on which city you see.
