Procrast-Nation

If you are a regular reader, you know by now that I am obsessed with starting these seemingly insane and pointless projects.  Well its time for another one, but this one I think has real potential.  As many of you may remember, project inbox overload was originally an attempt to see if it was actually feasible to fill a gmail account.  Sure enough, with the help of friends, I was able to reach the 7 gigabyte or so limit gmail provided.  I then found out that Yahoo offered “unlimited space”, so I immediately started a yahoo account and began signing it up for news letters and email updates and giving the email address out to sketchy websites that would spam it.  With some work, I was getting a couple thousand emails a day, over half of which for some odd reason were advertisements for Indian and plus sized breast porn.  Anyway, it didn’t take long for Yahoo to screw me out of my unlimited space.  Essentially the account broke.  It started accepting less and less emails and locking up more and more frequently until eventually, whenever I tried to log into the email I’d just recieve an error message.  The error message indicates that I should contact support, who were of course, non responsive.  The account had reached around 70,000 emails when this happened, which were, based on some calculations and estimating, under 2 gigabytes worth of space total.  As I predicted, yahoo’s unlimited space was a scam and their email was far inferior to gmail.  Anyway, the whole point of this past project was to test the limits of the free service, and also to see how easy it was to get signed up for a bombardment of emails.

Now, what does this have to do with Neil Ludd you may ask?  I will explain.  Recently people have used email less and less and have been spending more time and energy on facebook and other social networking sites. The amount of data transferred over these sites is ridiculous. People make hundreds, in some case thousands of “friends” to whom they send messages, post pictures, invite to events, play games with, and in essence, spam. For some crazy statistics, follow this link:

http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/Facebook-Statistics-2010.jpg

To highlight a few, there are over 400 million active users, 60 million status updates each day, 3 billion photos uploaded each month, and 5,000,000,000 pieces of content are shared EACH WEEK!

I feel that facebook, more than anything else, epitomizes the information glut that Neil Postman talked about in modern society. I figured, why not do a little experiment. I wanted to see how much facebook does to prevent people from over-using and distributing information, so I made an account under the alias Neil Ludd.

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Basically an argument that the American Criminal Justice system precludes the idea of an objective truth.  This violates one of the presuppositions of modernity, making the courts postmodern despite the fact that they are highly rationalized, creating a sort of paradox.  I use comparative law to build the argument.

If the Amanda Knox Case references seem kind of forced, it is because they are.  The paper was suppose to be about the case, so I somehow had to tie it in to my argument.
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First off, what did Bjork ever do to this Voice staff photographer?

She looks like a pug attempting, in vain, to dance the YMCA, or like her face has been flattened against some invisible wall. And that hair, jesus, that hair…

Bjork’s picture could at least have some rational explanation, but this? I though the whole appeal of a sex doll was that they didn’t talk.

But I’ve saved the best for last.

How does one conceive of such a contradiction terms? It makes about as much sense to post this bulletin as to leave cookies and milk out in hopes of trapping a wild Santa Claus(the pitch for my new primetime series”To Catch a Santa Claus”).

What could possibly be the point of this study? As appreciative as I am of presenting an opposing viewpoint, the time for crack-cocaine apologetics seems to have passed long ago.

The following definition of a manic episode is from the DSM-III, which is the older form of the standard manual used for the diagnosis of psychoactive behaviour in the modern world. I was unable to get my hands on a DSM-IV. This text works equally as well, but still I promise to update this post if I get my hands on one.

I’m not going to explicitly state any meaning or message. Nor am I going to begin the post with a clear thesis. What I am going to do is mutate the text by stressing some sentences and destressing others. I’ll run through several different mutations of the original text and will include an unaltered copy of the lithography at the top of the post. Here we go.

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An essay appropriating Foucault’s conception of power to my own understanding and interest of self-stereotyping behaviour. Ties to “The Distinction between Geeks, Nerds and Dorks.” I suggest the essay to you if not for the greater topic at large then for the novelty contained in the paragraph near the end where I describe goth kids as if they were gorillas in a zoo.

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From the warped genius behind ‘Silent Commando’ comes a music festival so enormous no one person could fund it. So thats where you come in.

Upstate New York, scenic background to my memoir posts, could have its own annual music festival, but the two guys who’ve set it up have hit a road block. Being college students (i.e. destitute), they have bands, but no money to pay them. They have a venue, but no money to hold it. But what they do have is one month and a Kickstarter account. And (fingers crossed here), the support of a grateful and generous community, including you, the reader.

Knowing the organizer, I can vouch this is a 100% grass-roots endeavor, a labor of love. And how can you argue with a line-up like this?

Every bit counts.

These were both for assignments, and as such have too much exposition. Feel free to skip the first paragraph of each. Reviews for Domestic Violence 2 and Broadcast News after the jump. (more…)

So a while ago I promised (sort of) to outline some major problems I have with utilitarianism as an ethical theory. Seeing as it’s generally well liked around these parts from what I can tell, I thought I’d follow through on that and get some chit chat going on the topic. Obviously I don’t have the time to get SUPER in depth with any of these and there may be some problems with a few (applying more readily to act instead of rule utilitarianism, for example,) but these can all be fleshed out should the conversation decide to move in that direction. Anyway. Some problems.

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Watched these a while ago but hadn’t really come to a verdict on them until now. As such, details may be somewhat shoddy.

Sherman’s March
dir. Ross McElwee
1986

This wasn’t McElwee’s first film, but it is by far his most famous and the one by which he’s usually remembered. A slow, rambling, 2 1/2 hour guide through what at first looks to be Sherman’s March through the south instead becomes a guided tour through McElwee’s wandering lifestyle and horrendously botched attempts to both date women and film Burt Reynolds.

The film is funny in parts, especially with the first girl Pat, and a certain sedentary momentum builds up, but honestly at least half an hour could’ve been cut with no real loss. And for all the build up, the ending seems arbitrary. NPR anchors must’ve loved this movie since its mildly charming and had no money put into its production. Nothing that interesting is captured though…McElwee’s life seems like a pretty comfortable and happy affair. Anything uncomfortable is usually done away with in one line of voice-over narration. There’s a limit to how interesting people are willing to act in front of a man who seems to have a massive camera grafted to him at all times. It points out why we need fictional cinema-certain spontaneous moments ironically can’t be captured spontaneously on camera.

I wonder if the people who run ‘reality’ porn websites are familiar with this film, since it pretty much follows their formula to a T, except without the 30 minutes of sex following each awkward first encounter and “Hey-what’s the camera for?” conversation.

Time Indefinite
dir. Ross McElwee
1993

More ‘cute’ voice-over narration, but at least McElwee gets to something meaty here. A lot happens, his father dies, he gets married, he has a child, so it doesn’t drag like the last one did. The image of the flopping fish on the dock has some staying power. I don’t feel inspired to write any more about this film.

Seriously, has anyone heard of this “tradio” thing? Its sort of like Want-Ad Digest, or Craigslist, but over the radio. People call in because they have some item they want to trade for some other item, and give their home number over the air, or they fax their items into the station and these items are read, usually for a FULL HOUR!!! A full hour, like 60 minutes! Who the hell is going to listen to the audio-book form of want-ads for that long?

How has craigslist not completely sent this the way of the dinosaurs? How? Who wants to listen to a full hour of nothing but want-ad listing EVERYDAY!!!???? (Answer: You do! And you can now, at the most worthless audio archive on the entire internet!) Perhaps for ten minutes it works if you decide to play armchair anthropologist and decipher where some of these godforsaken rural accents have sprung from. Is it Milwaukee’s Best induced fetal alcohol syndrome or the more hip PBR induced fetal alcohol syndrome? After listening to all 5 archived shows, you too can now decipher this slight difference. It’s fun, like learning bird calls or some bullshit like that.

“Tradio” has no redeeming value as listening material. There is no reason it couldn’t be replaced with a corkboard somewhere or an internet forum. At least the yule log and the channel on the TV that just plays a live feed of traffic have some therapeutic hypnotic quality. This has none of that.

Why does this still exist?? Are local stations really that strapped for programming?