I haven’t posted anything under the “bad is good” heading for a while, so… here’s a reminder that a garbage camera can be used to take prizewinning photos. See also lomography, crapshoot.
Category: JustThinkin
Thinking aloud about reddit.
I have a love-hate relationship with news site reddit.com. It contains a ton of interesting links, many of which I’ve reposted here. It is a reliable place to read about new appalling things done by the government, and to read about offbeat programming languages like Python and Lisp (both of which have at different times been used to run the site itself).
The site has the wonderful feature that you can moderate sites up — like “digging” on digg.com — or down. Somebody posts something stupid, you can hit the thumbs-down arrow and nuke the guy’s karma. Post something awesome and you get karma. (What is karma good for? Nothing, really. It’s just a number. It doesn’t affect you in any way except as a badge of honor or something.)
The “new appalling things done by the government” thing is maybe a bit more than I need right now. I’ve been getting political on the blog again, which is a danger signal to me that I’m maybe not feeling very well depression-wise, you know? There’s a lot of that on Reddit. (To be fair, there’s a lot of that all over the news too.) I could limit myself to just the Programming Reddit I suppose… But part of the fun of Reddit is that you get all kinds of stories on it. JUST the programming — well, for that I’d just go to lambda, the ultimate weblog. In fact, many highly rated links on reddit are things I saw two years ago on lambda, the ultimate.
I’ve played the “submit links to reddit” game and accumulated some karma. I never know though what’s going to be wildly appreciated and what will be loathed. Watching my karma take hits from people who don’t appreciate my link-posting GENIUS is a little stressful. Watching similar topics come up again and again on the front page — even when I might have appreciated those topics the first half-dozen times – is way tedious.
But absorbing. It’s like a video game you can’t win, you can’t even get past this one level, but you can’t quit either. Grr.
I think I may have to cut myself off.
Will I have to wean myself from Metafilter too? They have a lot of stuff that depresses me too. And they have that hateful habit of posting sentences where every single word (if not every single letter) is a different link.
Maybe I’ll have to go back to bOINGbOING…  Or pick up Table of Malcontents… Or even (I’m not proud) fark.com. I dunno. I learn a lot of neat stuff from Reddit’s links, but man. The voting, the karma, it’s a bunch of nonsense that sucks you in. I don’t need that.
Oh, btw — concerning Digg, this is the secret formula: digg : reddit :: slashdot : kuro5hin. Just so you know.
Berry vs. The Geekosphere
“The most radical influence of reductive science has been the virtually universal adoption of the idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines—that is, that there is no difference between creature and artifice, birth and manufacture, thought and computation. Our language, wherever it is used, is now almost invariably conditioned by the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology.”This may have begun as a metaphor, but in the language as it is used (and as it affects industrial practice) it has evolved from metaphor through equation to identification. And this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable.”
Mind Performance Hacks provides real-life tips and tools for overclocking your brain and becoming a better thinker. In the increasingly frenetic pace of today’s information economy, managing your life requires hacking your brain. With this book, you’ll cut through the clutter and tune up your brain intentionally, safely, and productively.
I Still Dream Of Organon…
I bought a copy of Kate Bush’s Cloudbusting the other day, because I’d bought her new album Aerial and it made me wistful for her old stuff from the 80s.
I knew that Cloudbusting was about Wilhlem Reich, but back in the old days we didn’t have no Inter Webs, and I couldn’t google around and learn the details. The details are pretty cool. It’s inspired by a book that Wilhelm’s son Peter wrote, about growing up in his father’s care, believing everything his father told him, and realizing only when his father was imprisoned and his books burned by the federal government, that almost nobody believed the things his father believed or thought his father was the genius that he considered himself.
I’d never made out the word “Organon” in the first line of the song (I’d thought it was something like “I still dream of all the noise…” — whoops). And other things about the song’s lyrics, which were puzzling before, become clear when you know what it’s about —
You’re like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made it special
Made it dangerous
So I bury it and forget
A yo-yo that glowed in the dark? Well… Reich experimented with radium at his laboratory, Organon. A yo-yo that glowed in the dark might well be special… and dangerous.
It’s an especially thought provoking song becuase Reich is such a character. He was in many ways a reprehensible fellow — the word “megalomanic” leaps to mind when one considers that he’s the author of a book-length rant called Listen, Little Man! (which reads exactly how you’d think it reads from the title). And, well, you know, “orgone energy” ain’t exactly, um, real. But… I don’t know. For all the craziness, it seems like at heart he was a man who saw how much society can hurt people, and fill them with anger and fear and hate, and who wanted to do something about it, and who convinced himself he’d found secrets which allowed him to change the world.
I would like to read the book that inspired the song.
Everytime it rains,
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out –
Ooh I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen.
Thank You, Marshall.
“Non-violent Communication,” a theory/technique/philosophy of communication (and of life) created by Marshall Rosenberg, has changed my life in really positive ways in the past year. It’s given me ways of looking at myself and others and my relationships that I don’t know if I’d ever have discovered on my own. It’s helped me as a parent. It’s shown me a way out of the pain of constant anger over the nation’s political system.
And now it’s time for me to say goodbye.
Well, not really. I don’t think I’ll ever leave behind the lessons I’ve learned trying to practice NVC. I don’t want to stop learning more about this way of relating to people. It’s done good things for me and I’m sure it’s got more to teach me.
But it’s hurting my effort at living mindfully.
Yep, this is another post about mindfulness — see my first and second. It more relates to the second — the “map is not the territory” phenomenon.
You see, for all it bills itself as a technique of communication, NVC is also a worldview, a way of understanding human life. It’s a picture of the world. And I’m a sucker, as I’ve said, for worldviews, theories, that claim to be “the real truth,” the little-known inside scoop on reality which if you know it makes everything easier. And accepting a particular model of reality, a particular way of understanding the world, as *the* way of understanding the world, is a mindfulness-killer.
Here’s the tip-off: you’re following instructions and you don’t get the results they promised. You don’t question the value of these instructions for you, you question your own value, ability, competence, worthiness. That’s a dead giveaway.
So I’m gonna back off. I’m going to stop making a conscious effort to use NVC in my parenting and other parts of my life, at least for a while. I’m going to open my mind to other ways of thinking about things. I’ve got it there as a way of looking at things but I’m not going to make it *the* way of looking at things.
I think even Marshall would approve. After all, he called his book Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, not Nonviolent Communication, The Language Of Life.