From Russia, With Blocks

One misstep'll kill ya

Something I saw today is making me feel like crap. Knots in the stomach, sweaty/tingly extremities, and propensity to cry at slight emotional instability. I must be syncing up or something… Sigh.

Someone once told me, “You paralyze yourself when shit goes wrong, so that you’re unable to get up and make it right”. Looking back at my blogger-days posts, I can see myself beating myself up so hard over shit like this. When it comes to intrapersonal stuff, I have a lotta deep, dark wounds, which I try to hide with wit & sarcasm & aloofness. When something got through those defenses though, I shut down. Hard.

These days, I feel as if I’ve made some progress–at least mentally, but I still get that physical/emotional hangover. And this event hits really close to home. Blah. Said I’d stop writing self-indulgent posts like this after blogger. I guess I just don’t know when to stop sometimes.

Gotta Get up, move on, and make it right. It’s the only way. To survive.

.:.

On a tangentially related note, I was reading the blog of one of my few frenemies yesterday. Turns out he had a lonely, shitty birthday on the 5th, and he has no real friends. I saw the title and thought I’d feel good readin’ the post, especially after the way he treated me the same day many years ago:

While b-day boy and all the cool kids (i.e. everyone else) were locked in his room laughin’ and havin’ a ball, I was sittin’ in the livin’ room babysitting his two elementary school brothers. I asked if I could come in, to which everyone replied, “NO.” Even homeboy’s mom ignored me and didn’t even look at me as she passed by to take snacks & sodas upstairs.

I have never forgotten how lonely, out of the loop, and plain shitty I felt that day. This experience, along with my first heartbreak still gives me hella insecurities and make up the biggest of my aforementioned wounds. Simple things such as not gettin’ a call back from someone can lead me to thinking that everyone hates me and I have no friends. So while I never wish ill on anyone, with this guy, I thought I’d be happy to see some karma in action.

I’m not. I pity him and his square head.

.:.

Fucking life. Fucking karma.

I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to do that.

So google finally announced their browser. You really gotta check this out; I’m sure it’ll be revolutionary in some aspect (open source, memory management, other architecture, etc.).

But what’s really of interest— to the artist in me at least—the geek in me is afk, shitting himself over the wonderful possibilities as well as the horrible implications for internet monopoly—is Scott McCloud’s beautiful & super informative comicbook describing what Chrome is & how it functions. McCloud captures the images of various coders and designers, and use them to explain Chrome’s features to users and dispense tech-talk to the developers. And man… If you’ve read McCloud’s other books, you know that McCloud has a wonderful grasp on the medium of comics, and can explain just about anything through a few, lines & a word bubble.

The part below perfectly illustrated what I perceive to be one of the most frequented and most frustrating part of a browser: the URL bar.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAA indeed!

In the new version of firefox, the “awesome bar” tries to give suggestions when you type into the box. But a lot of the times, these results just end up cluttering the short box and makes things even more difficult. In fact, while creating this post, I typed “hagure” into the URL bar and instead of taking me to hagure-metaru.net, I got a link for http://hagure-metaru.net/wordpress/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fblogoscoped.com%2Fgoogle-chrome%2F&t=Google%20on%20Google%20Chrome%20-%20comic%20book&s=&v=2

That is not helpful at all. I look at the first part of the URL, then my eyes glaze over at the trailing gobbledygook, and I feel like the programmer in the last panel. Here’s hopin’ Google comes through.

*sigh*

Here’s to the Google Monopoly… a reluctant cheer. May you guard my (and the rest of the world’s) data/life with wisdom, courage and justice.

Surprise!

Originally uploaded by iamanerddotnet.

NOTE: A work-in-progress… beta is yucky I know, but better than nothing for now…
There’s a good discussion going on at flickr (a place I should frequent more often), regarding “obey” and other’s use of images in the public domain (in this case, art that is really old). It’s a pretty good overview of the arguement, and I found myself nodding my head at many different points from bothsides. I believe Shanrosen says it best though:

If you are arguing that copying is unethical, have a deeper look at art history. Historically, artists always learned by copying the masters. Lots of copies of the works of the Old Masters exist, and many works only survive as copies. This is widespread in all the arts. Shakespeare, for example, used many earlier works when developing his plays. Think of the folk process, where works are changed and developed over generations, sometimes retaining much of their original character, and sometimes being substantially reworked but still clearly identifiable. Check out Bob Dylan’s works and his creative process. It is much the same as what we are talking about here (though Dylan is IMHO by far the superior artist).

We need to be clear-headed about copying and copyright. If we’re not, then we could acquiesce to a copyright regime which would be stifling for everyone except the media conglomerates. It is already affecting people here in Flickr who use old found images in their montages. Their pages have been removed from public view in case of (highly unlikely) copyright violation. The risk is seen as too high for Flickr to take.

But what effect is that going to have on the art of montage? We have perfect tools for it now (Photoshop, GIMP) but will we be unable to exhibit montage on the web for fear of copyright violation? (Fairey’s work is a digital montage of public domain works, a bit more subtle than the usual, but you people have identified the source images accurately.)

The Grooveblog discusses Roy Lichtenstein’s fine walk between appropriation and theivery.

to a lot of different music recently… that’s all

I have learned a lot about web design though…

I did pretty well on the reading ????and writing????? parts of my ???? ???????????(mid-term) So, why not invoke images of the Toughest Woman in the World, Chun-Li.

(Below: There’s still mistakes though, so don’t get mad at me when old master smacks you on the head for being disrespectful.)

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But round 2 is coming up tomorrow so I hafta make like a good student and do some studyin’.

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What should I do after everthings over… responsibilities are the best

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Oh… and I haven’t said this here but I’m going to Japan this summer. What should I bring?

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Oh well, I’ll think of that after some Kanji cards…

ps????????????
ps: hi doctor claw.
any other posse here?
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oh yeah, yesterd—today, I didn’t end up REALLY studyin till around 4-5am… not today though!