lilia makes a face

I thought that this was terribly cute. I am not sure what is happening... Did she just drink some pickle juice? Is she objecting to having her picture taken? Just did a shot of Jägermeister? Stepped in dog poo? Just reached nirvana? The list goes on. Like the Mona Lisa smile, so much can be read into her expression. One thing is for certain: A bonita é boba.
Lilia
Originally uploaded by Lilia K..

oy, bit of a backlog here

So a lot of things have been going on since my last post. Chief among those is the fact that while in Brazil I proposed to Lilia. Big news, and the fact that she is willing to swap hemispheres just to be with me is makes me feel lucky and humble. If all goes well she should be here this autumn, and we can start seeing about how to make this all work.

I didn’t want to blog about this before, since there were quite a few important people to tell, and I didn’t what them to hear about it via my blog before I had a chance to tell them in person. I think I told everyone, but if you are hearing about this for the first time here, sorry!

Hm. Well more on that in the weeks (months, decades…) ahead, so stay tuned.

Also about a week ago I went down to the Comicon to get all geeky, and see old friends from Oregon. It was a blast, and I ended up spending what little money I had after Brazil on books. Got to meet Lindsey, E’s new beaux. Scott + Janet were fun as always, and Mr. Matt (now a San Diego resident for 6 months) demonstrated a complete lack of local knowledge. Apparently he is not allowed out of his cubical for more then a few hours at at time over at the game company. Marion and John were running around in the indy comic zone. If Danny or Chad had been able to make it we would have had pretty much the whole crew back together. Well there is always next year.

Will add more as it comes to me.

the feasts of june

Well, the project has mostly been put to bed, and I have my ticket for 2 weeks in sunny Saõ Paulo with my sweety. So I should be posting quite a bit more over the next fortnight. Also keep an eye on my flickr site, since I plan to post pics frequently. I will be down there during the Feasts of June, which seems to be when the Brazillians celebrate harvest... It seems to involve corn, hayrides, and girls wearing their hair in pigtails... out in the country anyway. I'll be in the city or down on the beach, but I will be curious to see if anything is going on.

in other new, my sister just pointed me to this nice article. Pretty dead on, and I would only add that everyone, I mean everyone, is a fanatic about something.

Erm. I havn't been writing alot lately since I don't have alot to comment on other then confidental work stuff, summer reruns, or odd things I have seen on the subway. (actually the last one usually works pretty good, but its so hard to tell what is really odd these days.)

I did spring for a new keyboard for my PC. It is quite the bomb, as they say. It is made by Unicomp in my hometown in Lexington, KY, not far from my old high school. Anyway, back in the day, they were a divion of IBM that made the classic PS/2 keyboard. When IBM spun off their printer division (also in Lexington) to become Lexmark, the keyboard division got cut lose too.

So anyway, my new keyboard is basically a brand new PS/2 keyboard, clacky keys and all. It so rocks to type on. And this sucker should last forever as long as I treat her right.

gabby lala has been known to fraternize with ghosts…

Just found Gabby LaLa via Chad— the page cracks me up, and the audio sample is nicely demented. May have to preorder the CD

"Besides being an accomplished Sitar player, Gabby La La utilizes Toy Piano, Ukulele, Theremin, Accordion and Butterfly-Guitar while tap dancing and singing like Glinda the Good Witch from the Wizard of OZ. She is a wonderful inspiration and I whole heartedly support her nomination for Secretary of State." -Les Claypool

threesixty

Walking to the subway after work last night 10pm, I noticed the Xbox logo flashing on the Samsung screen in Time square, and I stood waiting for the loop to repeat to find out why Samsung was pushing the xbox. (Although Samsung is Sony's other big rival, so enemy of my enemy....) Duh- the Xbox360 special had just aired. Good thing I set it to record. Well sort of.

Watched the special, and it was even more content lite then usual. Obviously MS threw this together pretty late, to outmaneuver Sony crowding their Keynote. Interestingly the photo smuggled out of the taping of the even told me more then the show did. well, I guess they want to keep the real content for E3, and this was just a 'teaser trailer'. Still, I think that they could have either shown better how people would be playing the game, or gotten more into the nuts and bolts of the system- what they showed felt like the left over bits that didn't make it into the E3 presentation.

Like by having that rap guy 'nab' a prototype from the lab, and then show up at his mates 'crib' and they have a grand time playing before hearing the sirens after him... i.e. demonstrate how you can walk into your friends house where he has a huge nice HD TV and a lame game machine hooked up to it, and blow everyone away wiht the 360 you whip out of your bag. That would resonate with the audiance they are after I think.

So a couple of thoughts. no mention was made of backwards compatibility, which is not surprising. I can't imagine that they are even able to do that with the new machine, what with the new GPU. But I think it matters less then Sony will say it does. No one is going to be throwing their old Xbox out to make room for the new Xbox. It would be cool if that concave shape of the new machine matched the curve of the top of the old Xbox, so your could smoothly stack them. (of course the Xbox 3 would have to have a convex side to fit onto of the 360... Maybe they should just make them snap together like legos instead...)

Until they announce some games, the swappable faceplate is the interesting part for me at this point. It is something I have been interested in for a while. I will be curious to see if there are a lot of 3rd Party faceplates being made. I wonder if next year at Comicon people will be bringing a faceplate and sharpies to their fav artist to work on. Honda took the same approach with their Zoomer bikes, to very cool results. You get the 'naked' scooter, and then are able to add and customize the panels yourself, without needing a crazy machine shop.

PKA!

Paul Krugman has an Army Download and display your alliegance with this! (thanks Abu)

Since I posted PKA up by my desk at work, I have had more then a few people flash me the thumbs-up, on the sly. The army is mighty, and his agents are everwhere…
I love my cube
Originally uploaded by geegaw.

those wacky japanese

Really cool little read on neomarxisme, about the revival of popular cultures in Japan.

« …we have to recognize that there's no other sophisticated consumer market on Earth with less exposure to the original adopters than Japan. Not only did the Japanese not have a mass hippie movement in the 60s, they were spared all the residual hippies of the 70s. And accordingly, "the Sixties" as a cultural format is worshipped more in Japan than anywhere else in the world. »

—except for certain neighborhoods in Eugene, Oregon. But that is more of a great celebration of the post- post- hippie lifestyle. Second or third generation hippies busily creating something that bears little resemblance to anything the Japanese would recognize.

a little late

So I am not sure if I ever posted the pictures from the trip to Seattle taken by Lilia and myself, but here they are.

Last night went to Betty's goodbye party at a giant Japanese Buffet on 32nd st. It is a mighty impressing thing, to see what a party of Chinese can do at an all you can eat crablegs and lobster buffet! Since I am allergic to shellfish, I have to say that it was a little price for all you can eat sushi, but that was the only other thing that looked good. Generally I think sushi is best in moderation, as it is a little to rich to be a whole meal… But it was a very fun evening, and got to see a lot of people from Parsons I have not seen in forever, so it was completely worth it.

post-capitalism

Right interesting post by Momus on Post-Capitalism and the creative class. It is kind of about those hip neighborhoods, where people seem to get by jobless, or freelancing, and always seem to be working on their own projects. Generally the problem with those neighborhoods are that the rents have to be low enough to support the so-called 'slacker' lifestyle. So then demand for apartments quickly outstrips the supply, and the creative types quickly get priced right out. SoHo, Dumbo, and Greenwich Village are all examples of these ex-bohemian conclaves here in NYC.

Anyway, there seems to be some interesting points there, and I have been wondering what the next counter to the capitalism model was going to be... Since communism, socialism, and anarchism all seem to have faded from people's imagination. The interesting thing about the post-capitalistic lifestyle is that is more of economic Buddhism then anything else. It poses the question of "does a bigger TV make you happier, considering everything you have to put toward getting it?" Well if this actually goes somewhere, then that might have some interesting ramifications.

Ah well, these are noble ideas, but the practicalities seem to always be the stumbling blocks. It is hard to raise kids, and it is harder still if you are laboring under self-imposed economic austerity. It can suck to be poor when there are mouths to feed.

Still in the end it is a question of people's values shifting away from the capitalistic model, (which is certainly not the only model) which can have a big long term impact down the road. Generally if a people as a whole come to realize exactly how much they are getting shafted, they force an adjustment. In this case the assumption that people will continue to organize their lives around maximizing their paycheck, even as their quality of life continues to slide- well, can it be assumed that they will not follow their self interest even if it leads outside the capitalistic model?

bored

From the 'waiting for the content management system to get fixed' file:

My list of top 5 albums I am aware of. (would be ...Of all time, but that imples omniscience on my part.) And yes, I am aware that this is going to (carbon 14) date me.

5. Rain Dogs by Tom Waits
4. Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
3. Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart by Camper van Beethoven
2. Ruby Vroom by Soul Coughing
1. Surfer Rosa by the Pixies

Honorable Mention: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco
(still pretty young, so have to wait and see how it holds up over the years.)

hm.

Can anyone explain why it is so fun to Box-doodle? Nothing earth-shattering flash-wise, but I love the interface.

arête and free samples

One thing I have been thinking about are notions of people’s filters. Modern humans are tuck in a sea of data and experiences- more then ever before. And while people are instinctively about pattern recognition, to do that we also have to be able to focus and filter out the noise. I think of a primitive hunter listening for the tell tale rustling of his dinner in the bush- and filtering out the other forest sounds. His ability to filter out the extemporaneous, and piece together the relevant sounds into a pattern allowed him to know where to strike, and thus feed his family.

Those same skills and instincts are needed for the modern world, as advertising and information increasingly has become our modern forest.

Anyway, a big part of marketing is to make advertising (something instinctively filtered by adults these days) fit a pattern of something the person is looking for. To rustle like an animal, as it were. The old tactics of increasing exposure, (plastering the ad on every surface the person sees) or ramping up the volume (screaming at the person) to cut through the filters is pretty much doomed to failure. People will eventually close their eyes and stick their fingers in their ears, then put up with that kind of treatment. And then probably forever associate negative attitudes with that product or message.

And this really is more then about marketing- it is about communicating with other people, outside the personal one-on-one space.

I think that public protests, and demonstration marches are a broken form of communication. No matter how organized the marchers, how clever their signs and chants, or even how big their puppets are- they are no longer affecting people in they way they used to.

One thing that cuts through the filters is newness. When people encounter something new, then they have to cope with it. Once it becomes known, and old hat, then they are able to filter and ignore it. Protest marches in the 1960s were new, because they had never been televised before, and so for most Americans it was a new thing- and the messages of the protesters was communicated.

Much like how when email spam first appeared, it got high level of responses- people were not used to getting advertising in email form, and so they tended to respond to things like the Nigerian bank scam that they would not have paid attention to in any other format. They were new to the online media, and had no established context for filtering out the bad from the good, and would get suckered.

These days this really does not happen anymore- those not already open to the message filter out the with nary a thought. Whether it is an email ad, or a protest, or any other established means of inflicting a message on another, it has a filter.

Beyond newness, I have been thinking about how to use established cues to evade the filters. There are some cues that are considered safe, and get noticed. Simply because they are not typically exploited, for one reason or another, they would tend to get past those filters, and would be considered by the recipient. At least until they learn to discern it from the real McCoy.

AOL sought to lure more customers through their mailer CD. They sent out billions of those things, because unlike TV or magazine Ads, these actually had a pretty high response rate. People were not used to receiving CDs in the mail. It had a feeling of arête or of quality. You could throw away unopened junk mail, but a Computer CD? That seemed too valuable to drop in the trash. And so people’s filter was circumvented, and they had to pop that CD into their computer and deal with it.

Later people learned that the AOL CDs would keep coming, and they were just a new form of junk mail. AOL sent out more and more, but their response rate kept dropping. But then they sent out one, in a Jewel case, and the response probably went up. That was because unlike the cardboard mailers they had been using, now a CD in a Jewel case had arête again- it felt like a 15$ music CD. Still later AOL sent out a disk in a DVD case, and it had the same effect. It felt like it had value, and could not be dismissed easily. Later still, possibly at the apex of this marketing endeavor, they sent out the CDs in a custom metal tin case. That was some serious arête, and it because how could you not value something in a TIN?

I think in the end the cost of this tactic was prohibitively expensive, especially since AOLs problem was not getting new customers, but keeping retaining them. (Once people got their feet wet on the Internet with AOL, they would leave for less annoying services in about a year) Still, we have a powerful instinct to seek and respect quality in things. And the reason we filter things, is because they lack value. Make an ad have value on its own, and it it will not be filtered.

A case in point is the movie TV ads. Yes it is an ad, crammed between other ads. But it is also a ‘free sample’ of the final product. It not only something that lets you make a purchase decision, it also can be enjoyed for its own sake. People always line up for free samples, and other types of schwag, because it seems too valuable to dismiss.

Not brilliant or groundbreaking, but my interest is how to apply this to other areas then the marketing of films or breakfast sausage. How to apply it to Abstract concepts, or messages- the things that get most easily filtered out?

thusdays… i never could get the hang of thursdays

Saw a latino man driving a truck on the manhatten bridge this morning. I was riding the Q train as ususal, and when it goes over the bridge it is right next to the center lane of traffic. (the manahtten bridge is layed out a bit strange, as it was orginall envisioned as having 4 subway lines going over it, and 2 lanes of traffic. but this was before WWII, and the american love affair with the car happened. Now they have 4 lanes of traffic and 2 subway lines, in a rather strange configuration.)

Anyway, this guy was keeping pace with the train, and listening to something GOOD on the radio. he was totally jamming, and had a huge grin on his face, and really getting into the music- he was singing along, and waving his arms- probably not the safest thing to be doing on a bridge behind a . Could have been merenge, could have been hip-hop. no idea, except it was really punching his clock. It really kicked me out of my 9 am blahs. Quite infectious that.

So I have been noticing that I have little to no gadget lust for either the PSP or the Gameboy DS. Not sure why- maybe it is just wating till the right game showes up. Then again, I have not been interested palying any new games since H2 and WoW came out. so either there are just not that many innovative games out, (quite true) or its that I am burning out on the whole activity- and just need to focus on something else. Probably though about the time Katamari Damancy comes out on the PSP, I will feel the old lust again.

today, on this day, the gods smiled

Well, off there to the right, you can see a RSS icon now- finally set up a feed, per request.

Fantastic weather here in NYC, April and May (as well as October & November) almost makes up for the rest of the year. Long before I moved here, I remeber watching NYPD Blue, and being confused about the sunlight and trees they were showing in the city. Having never been there, I pretty much based my idea of it on 70s films and tv shows, and imagined it being perpeturally dark with light reflecting off of wet streets, as the subway rumbled by. Sort of like Dark City crossed with the French Connection.

In other news, I am finally moving forward with my long discussed plans to set up a letterpress here in Brooklyn. keep an eye out for updates on the Albatross Press, although there is little going on now, other then moving into the space, and gradually organizing. Should be cool though.

Also check out the Starbuck's Delocator, for alt.coffee in your area.

These pretzels are making me thirsty

Well sorry for the lag, but big things have been happening, and so I have not been blogging of late. Also small bursts of nice weather have been attracting my attention. Of course now snow is flying on 38th street again, so here I blog.

going to try and catch Steamboy this week... erm that is about all I can talk about at the moment.

more soon. I promise.

'ello again

So I made it though my birthday rather well this year- had a fun and adventurous dinner with good friends, (almost all of whom are members of the Duck Mafia) and made out like a mad man in the presents department... I have an irrational belief that there is a independent authority that measures your performance each year, and sets limits on the material goods you get on the birthday; without going into specifics I feel like there was a computer error somewhere along the line. And somehow my craven advertising of my amazon wishlist (see below) seems to have not been a factor…



A big score is a that my sister ordered for me a DVD set of the Magic Monkey show, 70s TV series based on the Journey to the West novel- think Shaw brothers kung-fu crossed with Sid and Marty Kroft, and you are getting close. Since it is only out in the UK, it is a Region 2 PAL set of discs, so I now have a golden reason to get that multiregion/format DVD player. But for now I can watch it on my computer. Also check out this chinese theme park based on the book- nifty!



I also got a stack of Footrot Flat comics, possibly NZ's best export not named Haya, or involve Peter Jackson. Lilia sent me an antique fountan pen, and a Lupin the 3rd DVD (among other things) I would go on, but I would hate to veer into bragging territory, (*cough* ticket to see Interpol *cough*) so I will leave it there. The Doraemon showercap was certainly unexpected though.



The birthday dinner was at the Yakitori Canteen, which is literally around the corner from my pad, and a fun little joint. (owned by the same people who opened the sushi place Nana on 5th ave.) Had a huge variety of tasty things to share, although I think the grilled eel really stuck out. Then at the end of the evening, they came out with a platter of fruit sushi with a candle... ^_^ I will post a link to pictures when they are available.