Been thinking about story a lot lately.This tends to happen when I read an author that I love, and Gibson certainly counts in that regard. Thinking of plots, characters…how to string them together. Person and perspective.
What it comes down to is that I really do need to find time and try to make myself write.
Need to write fiction, that is, not blog.
đŸ™‚
Well…after a half inch or so of ice and sleet, we’re stuck at home today. No school, and probably not a lot of moving until the stuff melts…a chance to catch up on some work and get some stuff done.
I was attempting to make any sense out of some of the recent political events here in the US, and I found that framing them with Orwell has become just a little to appropriate.
Ministry of Peace:
We spend the better part of 2 years looking for bin Laden. When it becomes clear that hunting down one man isn’t what our military is trained for, we are told that Saddam is the real enemy. I have only seen ONE report on the major news networks about the recent bin Laden tape broadcast on al jazeera, but daily updates about the upcoming war in Iraq.
It seems that even now we are seeing the switching of opponents at will.
In addition, we get our dose of Two Minute Hate in our little terrorism scale…want the public to jump? Up the “threat”.
Ministry of Information:
I suppose that everyone saw the report by some in the government that Duct Tape and plastic sheeting was a good thing to have around in case of a terrorist action involving a dirty bomb or biological agents.
First off, as someone who worked in a pathological microbiology lab for the better part of 4 years, I can ASSURE you that the likelyhood of a modified smallpox virus caring that you have plastic over your windows is next to nothing. Unless you plan on locking yourself in for several months, and recycling your own air supply (and water….)….this is just ludicrous. But I suppose if you tell the plebes what it takes to scare them, it does make it easier to predict their behavior.
I have yet to see even one report on the major news networks questioning the upcoming war.
*double sigh*
Uneventful Saturday, thus far. Hoping to go see Daredevil this evening, but don’t have firm plans yet. Been working on homepage and rescuing all of my old web projects (like the wedding page I did, as well as the HIVEMIND website for my Raw Deal group).
Also working on a project for classes on anonymity on the web….checking how good certain anonymity products are.
So I’ve decided to gather a bunch of the web stuff I’ve done over the last bunch of years and link them all together from my homepage.
To that end: www.unc.edu/~griffey/
I’ll be slowly putting everything together over the weekend…we’ll see how quickly it comes together.
I listened to some news reports today about people buying up all the plastic sheeting and duct tape in stores because some governement official suggested that they would be useful if there was a bio-terrorist attack. The theory is that you would seal the windows and such in your house to keep the bad stuff from getting in.
Are you kidding me?
Of the possible bio-agents, I can’t think of a single one that would reliably be stopped by silly attempts like this. Not to even START on the likelyhood of the average person doing a good job of sealing the entire house…all the vents (including the plumbing vents on the roof? the bathroom vents?)…it’s just silly fear-mongering.
*sigh*
I’ve mostly stopped watching the news due to stuff like this. This was on the radio…guess I’m gonna have to just read the paper from now on…
I can’t BELIEVE that the American people are falling for the propoganda of the current administration….how quickly we are doped by the media feeding us FUD.
Have we already forgotten all the problems with Bush and company? Cheney still hasn’t come clean about his role with the energy conglomerates, we’ve got a war machine that seems to be COMPLETELY IGNORING the guy that everyone in America WANTS dead (bin Laden) and instead we just blindly are supporting a war that, as far as I can tell, seems to be just an attempt to finish what his father didn’t.
We’ve got an ACKNOWLEDGED psychopath running North Korea, who we KNOW has nuclear capabilities…and we’re ignoring him.
Anyone who claims this isn’t about oil and some fucked up American empire that Bush is trying to build is just fooling themselves.
And I blaim the media for most of the problems…not a single major TV news agency has hit the air with a story contrary to that they are being fed by the government. It’s just unbelievable.
This is one of the few times I’ve been ashamed to be an American.
A little note about the title of my blog: it’s from the newest book by William Gibson. The book itself deals with branding and the saturation of symbols that we all just look past if we notice at all. The main character has an allergy of sorts to brand iconography…the Nike swoosh, golden arches….these marketing devices literall make her ill. Really a clever book thus far…very different from some of his other works. It’s more “near” than “future”….but the title jumped out at me. That’s what I think most intelligent people are trained to do…see patterns where others don’t. It’s something that I’m going to work on improving and formulating a bit more as the blog goes on.
Two very good quotes from Samuel Clemens….
Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
– Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Something I think about randomly: because of the current information fear climate (RIAA, MPAA, DMCA, PATRIOT and all the other combinations of letters we are barraged with on a near-daily basis now) will we learn to question every exchange of information with this question:
Is this legal?
Springboard for this thought today: when I learned that my wife was showing a film to her university class, my very first question was “does that count as a “public” showing?”
It’s a sad thing that I even really needed to think that at all, much less for me to assume that there might be something wrong with educational use of an info source.