Socially engineered reading tactics

The evergrowing pile of to-do’s

So I’ve been true to (some of) my word(s), and I’ve gotten subscriptions to RSS feeds and now know pretty well how to use them. The first mistake I did was subscribing to everything. It took a while of unsubscribing to get my total daily feed updates under 1000, and even that is only possible to manage when I check my Google Reader every day. Eventually, the numbers build up and I just need to flush them without reading them. Sadness, to view the splendor of all that information and to have to let go, to choose what I read and what I don’t, is SO hard. If a Vampire offered eternity, I might take it. But until then…

La politique et ses hommes de paille

Savez-vous ce qu’est un homme de paille?

From Haiti, or From Central-Western Africa. Fetish object of power, or magical substitute for an enemy through which sorcery is conducted.

Le mot a plusieurs sens, évidemment. Au-delà du sens littéral, d’un homme fait en paille, comme l’épouvantail ou les petites poupées en paille africaines (ou voodoo) qu’on voit certains ramener au pays comme des souvenirs, il a aussi un sens en rhétorique ainsi qu’un sens au niveau des relations publiques(0). En rhétorique, un homme de paille est une version truquée, amoindrie, affaiblie d’un argument adverse qu’on s’amuse à défaire devant un auditoire, de manière à rendre notre réfutation de la position adverse plus convaincante en apparence. Sinon, un homme de paille est un homme qui prête son nom à un autre, à ses gestes ou à ses écrits pour que celui-ci puisse agir sous le couvert de l’anonymat. On pourrait-dire un prête-nom(1).

WordPress doesn’t like Shelfari!

Pissed.
I was entering some more of my books on Shelfari.com (there are 99 now) when I discovered there was a Shelfari widget I could use to showcase my book collection on my blog. How useful!

Scavenging content

I’m still trying to figure out how I can get a site to automatically post content from an RSS feed. There’s some pretty costly blogging software out there, which I’d rather not buy. If I knew how to program, I’d make one. Can’t be that difficult, can it? But then again, I’d have to learn how to write code more intricate than pseudo-code and HTML. FML.

Me vs. Me: a Draw!

Back to the drawing board.

I’ve failed so far at maintaining any kind of regular schedule for my blog. Fine, interwebs, you can be just like the rest of my life, positively entertaining, mutually feeding fields of procrastination. I need to figure something out.

Internet Explorer… (Exploring the Interwebs, Part 2)

Internet Explorer cannot and should not be a trademark or a copyrighted name. I don’t know if it is, but I don’t care about facts and reality, I’m speaking about normativity. The names are too simple. I explore the Internet. I am an Internet explorer. No one should be able to prevent me from saying the truth in describing myself with common dictionary words. There is no way Internet Explorer could be seen as a trademarked name that it makes any sense to protect by law. None at all. Fair Use and Free Speech Mutha…..zs.

Netspace, the final frontier…

(1)Exploring the net is exploring humanity. I tried to make this point before, in my first blog post, but without being particularly clear. From my point of view, there is no great discontinuity between information technology (IT), or the IT revolution (STR)(2), and preceding human culture. Of course there’s the inevitable dichotomy between two points of view, with two breaths of scope, one geared-in-on-the-grain close-up, and the other, the general picture wide angle shot (3). There is no a priori superiority of one point of view over the other. So it remains to be explained how I feel comfortable advancing this idea that there is “no great discontinuity” in this era of an IT economy (4).

Exploring the Interwebs (Part 1)

I, like most people, explore the web through search engines and links, and barely enter into any interactive, web 2.0 based (1) activities, other than social networking. And then again, I did that mostly through facebook. My twitter account is famously inactive: I sometimes just don’t see the point, but I know the problem resides with me and my user habits.

Links and semiotic misfire

Have you ever “correctly” interpreted something spontaneously, its meaning or its portent, then became conscious of your ignorance of how you came about this interpretation, which leads to a skeptic rational doubting of that experience, and generates the seed for the reversal of that judgment and the adoption of an incorrect interpretation, which then needs to be undone once more if truth is to be found? Yeah? Me too.

Blogs I Enjoy

1-Since I plan to suggest other blogs to my readers, I put in a Blogroll widget. 2-Since the blogroll widget is a links widget with another name, it lists all links I make without discrimination. 3-Since I cannot figure out on my own how to get around this issue;

I therefore plan to list here some blogs and news sources I enjoy to peruse, or those run by friends of mine, in order for them to make an appearance in said list. The links sh/w-ould include a short description, but often don’t. Hope you enjoy what you find!