Some things are too good to last

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There is no doubt Periscope is a great live-streaming app. The unparalleled interactiveness of the apps unlike any other similar apps will come to an end after 6 years from its release. at its best text comments and verbal replies can be achieved in under ten seconds, far quicker than any other live-streaming app. Perhaps equal in speed to instant messaging or Usenet (and likely using such technologies) it made text/video online conversation and dialogue enjoyable.

YouTube Live, for example, while does something is nowhere as interactively engaging because of the lag. I suspect the lag exists because older minimal (not minimalist) technology is used. The frustration not only shows in the broadcasters face but also in the viewers messages as well as them voting with their feet (that is, exiting the broadcast midway).

As I have said many times I would have paid for the service to broadcast. A monthly fee of, say, USD5 would have had me forking it out for its service. The exchange should have been between me and the service provider, not between me and the viewers with the service provider taking a slice of the action.

While the business model is similar to television (this reflected in its name PeriscopeTV) it really did not work that way. Banking on broadcaster content when broadcaster content has not the manpower, time and money invested in it, did not work.

But, in the end, whatever the reason that Periscope is coming to an end it is sad and will be truly missed.

Selling stuff, clearing space and mind

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Over the weekend I cleared out a bunch of stuff from the house – an electric guitar and its related gear, an old telescope, a dehumidifier, a bathroom scale, CD players.

Not so much was it about the money but what a waste it would be to just to dump them. While they were being evaluated at the secondhand store I checked out what they had. Just how much people are getting rid of things and the kinds of kinds that are gotten rid of is simply amazing. It seems guitars are hot items and so are dehumidifiers if the price I got is a reflection of its worth. It kind of makes sense that utility goods like dehumidifiers and fridges should retain value. They move and are sold. We do not escape material reality in any way.

But as I said, it wasn’t the money. It was therapeutic just to clear out the space called “home” and “mind”.

Why ‘Seven of Nine’?

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Seven of Nine is one of only a handful of the Borg species that has we know of by a name. One is another, a name given to himself. Picard as an assimilated Borg was named Locutus. By whom the name was chosen is, as far as I know, not stated.

But we must can assume that individualistic names is far from being a Borg thing. So does Seven of Nine mean that she is a seven of nine in a group, orderly and like a set? Or are the numbers nominal and the ‘of’ has no real meaning? Considering how many Borgs there are (assimilated) Single digit names seem hardly enough to cover all individuals in the Borg Collective. Likely there are thousands of individuals so there could be “1432 of 9” or “2 of 34254”.

Likely too is that there is no hierarchy. For example, I do not think Six of Nine out ranks Seven of Nine because of a one-digit difference. It would seem illogical to have a hierarchy in a collective of unranked drones. There is something socialistic or communistic about the Borg.

Likely, a short double-barrelled single-digit name is easier than “23482 of 967” as a name. As in real life uncommon names can either make it very easy or difficult to remember.

Another question is, do all individuals have unique names or do some have the same name like “David” or “John” in the English speaking world.

And is Seven her first name, and Nine her last?

So many questions so few answers.

Words are not things

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Words are not things but semi-things. Their age matters not. The size of the fonts changes nothing of their meaning. And whether it is serif or san-serif will not make a single difference (apart from functional sustained legibility).

In other words, words have little to no properties. The font’s colour means nothing, unless it is an art t-shirt from that now-defunct Oxford Street shop in Sydney that read “blue” in red letters. Read the word out loud and the colour no longer has any meaning. This is word play in written form. The medium is the message as someone once said.

In Japan more people say the name King&Prince more than any other name right now (my daughter included). But nothing changes about the group. The group is still made up of six people no matter how many times one invokes the name. ‘Popularity’ means something else other than physical quantity. We may count the number of times in it is mentioned in the media or searched for on Google. Nothing changes the fact that they are ordinary people that bleed when pricked or cry when they are emotionally down.

My point is, words are not the same thing as the things or non-things they represent. Not only are they separate to the things/non-things they represent, their characteristics (if they can be characteristics at all) are different as well.

blog bloat

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I cleaned up my blog today.

I changed the title back to the URL, got rid of most of the pages, streamed lined the menu, removed most of the widgets and rewrote the about page.

What is left is effectively a timeline of 5 posts at the top and a simplified navigation of the essentials.

I had suffered from blog bloat without knowing it. lol

Buy a sound bar

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One does not realise just how bad the internal speakers of a TV is until one hooks up a sound bar or stereo. During this last Christmas holidays I hooked my stereo combo as a treat for the kids. Only then did I remember just how awful th sound quality had been all this time.

I opted for a sound bar for a couple of reasons. One a friend had just bought one for his new TV. Intrigued by it I had connected the idea that with the ubiquity of Bluetooth this would mean my sound bar could play music as well. Turning my lounge into an entertainment area was one goal. But better still I realised that the Apple TV hooked up to my computer was better served with the TV. That move was a game changer. Since I set this all up I can play music, watch YouTube and movies with the best sound possible.

The change in technology had been something hanging around my neck for a while. I simply did not know how to deal with it coming from the late twentieth century. With everything connected – the IoT – it means we no longer live in just a physically bound world. Or rather the way we bind to things is different. There was a shift in the paradigm. This was something I have had to struggle with and only now is beginning to make sense.

Freedom?

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What does it mean when we say “we are free to do anything we want”?

It means we are deluded into thinking we are isolated individuals outside of an interconnect world. Everything I do affects everything else around me, so long as I related to it in some way.

So the question is is there any thing, space or time from which we are not related to all else? Experience tells me no. Some may argue that freedom is in the mind. But if the mind is located in the body, in the brain, then it is itself a relational operation. There is no thing which operates outside of things, space and time. Every action has real consequences. To think that even your thoughts do not have consequences is to be sorely mistaken. For although they do not have immediate “outer” consequences they have “inner” ones. They affect the body that thinks. To think is in itself an action.

Time and events

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I remember 9/11.

But I don’t remember it as 9/11 but 9/12. I was in Sydney that day. Woke up to the images on the screen, my mother was staring in disbelief. Not much can silence my mother but this did.

Yes, I am a somewhat intelligent guy (been to university, even did postgraduate studies), but I still think of it as 9/12. I do this because it says something about time and our perception of it, especially in this day and age where real-time means I see 9/11 in 9/12.

Philosophically, that is important or not trivial to me. If this event had occurred before my birth or outside of my awareness of it I would learn and remember it as 9/11, that is, I would not pair the event with my time and place.

20210107 is another event I would remember as thus. The day American democracy was no longer such. That for years to come they will spend time repairing what had occurred in the four up until that moment. That the next administration will have a fight on their hands with something that was covert but now open. The ugly side of America has been exposed.

There is a beautiful side to America, to its values and culture. That, I will never forget. Those who stormed Capitol Hill are not representative — thankfully — of the majority as this last election has pointed out. But rather, America has a lot of soul searching to do for decades to come. And this comes from someone who does not believe in a soul.

i see what you mean

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if it is not with your eyes,
then what is it that you see
the world with?

some say
you see
with your mind.

if so, then why did god
bother with giving us eyes
in the first place?

the “mind’s eye”
is a great metaphor, but
in there it shall remain.

for words can do this –
make things appear
from paper thin air

and their appearance, it
may linger in the wind or
on the page for far too long.

Chain of Keys

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1.
“This house was built in 1788.”

Although most people will see this statement is a factual one, I will argue that it is, in fact, imbued with value and judgment.

We choose to highlight something by stating it, by making it the subject of a statement. Something must be focused upon (apart from “dummy” statements like ‘it’s raining’ or ‘it’s me’ but I will argue these are not empty subjects) when we say anything. To choose to focus upon the house is something consciously done by a speaker. And to choose to highlight its age is another choice. Both are given importance by stating them as facts. Value is thus given to them. They – the house and its age – are judged to be important facts.

2.
Poets and songwriters are masters of value making. A good example is PJ Harvey’s Chain of Keys.

Fifteen keys
Fifteen keys hang on a chain
The chain is joint
The chain is joint and forms a ring
The ring is in
The ring is in a woman’s hand
She’s walking on
She’s walking on the dusty ground

The dusty ground’s a dead-end track
The neighbours won’t be coming back
Fifteen gardens overgrown
Fifteen houses falling down

The woman’s old
The woman’s old and dressed in black
She keeps her hands
She keeps her hands behind her back
Imagine what
Imagine what her eyes have seen
We ask but she
We ask but she won’t let us in

A key so simple and so small
How can it mean no chance at all?
A key, a promise, or a wish
How can it mean such hopelessness

“The circle is broken”, she says
“The circle is broken”, she says

Out of the void of the music comes fifteen keys on a chain. We send time wondering, imagining, what kind of keys and chain they are. We are told, next, chain is not a like a strand but is joined to form a loop (ring). But where is this ring of keys? It is in the hands of a woman. What is she like? How are we to imagine her? We don’t know, but we are told she is walking on the dusty ground. Why is she walking on here? So many questions. So many images. The sparse repetitive sax and drum line gives us an image of her walk walking among the fifteen empty falling down houses with their overgrown gardens. The story goes on.

I hope you can see how the words have created the image for you. It may well be based on an actual place with actual persons with actual things and actual dialogues but it no longer belongs to the event, only belonging to the memory (or thought) and (or) to the song.

3.
To take statements as facts of reality is to not understand that statements are acts in reality. They are acts within the reality. They do not stand outside of reality. This is what, I believe, Derrida had meant by there is no outside text (alternate translations ‘there is nothing outside of the text’; ‘there is no outside context’). The largest most inclusive category – as tiring as this approach physically and mentally is – must be taken in order for anything to be make complete sense. And we must forget that rational sense itself is an act within this reality not separate from it in any way.