Photo by Leah. As our pied cockatiel gets older, supposedly the feathers of his face will get more and more yellow, a process we can see happening slowly with him. It’s hard to suss out how much personality he really has. He’s not quite like a dog or a cat, where there is true loyalty shown, his motivations and preferences are more subtle than either. He will hiss when he doesn’t like something, he will bite if something’s happening he does not like, while if he likes something he’ll sort of dance around or coo a bit. He’s very fun to watch, and having him on my shoulder makes me appreciate the way movie pirates have Parrots on their shoulders. I suppose birds are what people watched before they did before television.
February 2008 Twelve posts
Unsung: 7 Years Blogging
7 Years!
Last week was the 7 year anniversary of my blogging here on artlung.com. I had a hard week last week but I’m tanned, rested and ready. Well, not tanned, but I’m back here anyway.
So I have some questions for you readers, if any. Why do you read ArtLung Blog and when did you start reading this blog? Also, what blogs should I check out?
Thanks!
Ah, Nostalgia
This graf from Paul Ford is evocative for me:
In the late 1980s there was a prevalent nostalgia for the 1950s that made its way into collage culture. That was my first exposure to irony proper; I watched Leave it to Beaver and bought zines with collages of men with pipes and smiling housewives. An escape from the metalhead norms of the neighborhood. At the same time cyberpunk was on the rise, science fiction as pure chaos, styrofoam in the bay and VCRs washing up on the beach, brains filled with silicon, empty buildings. I saw the point of these novels as I sat for hours spinning pixels in DeluxePaint, cutting and pasting. It was nearly impossible back then to get an image into the computer: scanners were exotic, audio recording nonexistent. You had to use the images provided or create your own. The only way for the computer to communicate with the larger world was through the printer, or a modem dialed into a BBS (never for me), or disks copied from friends. I remember spending tens of hours working with one image of Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd that I’d found on some disk somewhere, switching heads, adding third eyes, and so on. Just for the process, to see if I could.
I’ve felt nostalgia for DPaint before.
I remember that washed-up VCR — I believe it’s from Islands in the Net, which I’ve mentioned before.
Deleted
Actual comment spam content left on one of the blogs I manage:
Please, do not delete the given message. Money obtained from spam will go to the help hungry to children ugand+
Won’t anyone please think of the children?
The Mind of the Market
Fascinating video about market, social, evolutionary, genetic economics. Heck, it’s about everything. Talk at Google:
via Paul Kedrosky: Michael Shermer on the Mind of the Market
Kate Nash on Jools Holland
The other day I got a comment from Ellen mentioning Jools Holland, who I have indeed heard of, and here’s Kate Nash again, singing Foundations from Jools’ show. If I haven’t warned you before, I’ll warn you now, Kate uses salty language.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y9Xl9rdCPbE