I can’t imagine when it was, as i hardly ever watch television, but i definitely have a recollection of channel-surfing past a Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies advertisement and remarking to Elise that i ought to buy it. Why? Because i would be a lot more likely to dance around in my living room like an idiot then do, say, ten pushups a day.
She doubted me at the time, but had she seen the solid gold dancing i’ve got going to the Chicago soundtrack right now i think she might… erm… well, she’d say i was gay.
Right. But, what’s important is she loves me.
off-topics
As someone who has ostensibly spent the last three and a half years of my life studying journalism at times i have a lot to say about the current state of the American news media. Any major US news outlet is over-reporting, under-representing, over-the-top, unprofessional, and altogether useless as far as i’m concerned. However, this isn’t really the fault of the programmers — it’s the fault of the American public. You would think that consumers would reject local news that resembles an erstwhile clip of Entertainment Tonight, or that they would at least demand that Philadelphia have a single daily paper not owned and published by the Knightridder corporation. But, they don’t, and their low expectations and low-brow interests are the undeniable trend-setters of what gets covered, with sometimes shocking implications.
As such, i was initially taken by surprise to see CNN headline with an internet story. My surprise only lasted long enough, though, to realize that the lead-in to the story was rife with buzz-words, and that it primarily existed to address the intermittent but highly-annoying slow-down that began earlier this weekend. The article proclaims that “Experts called the worm the most damaging attack on the Internet in 18 months,” and it was assertion that i found most shocking of all. Plainly, it is incorrect, even without taking into account a conflicting statement made in the same artcile: “It’s not a major risk. It’s not [doing] either of the two things that are terribly damaging,” Paller said. “One is hurting people’s machines, and one is knocking things [off-line].” By contrast, the relative blip on the media radar caused by a distributed denial of service attack this fall that left nine of the thirteen major DNS root servers temporarily down for the count definitely ranks, in my opinion, as possibly the most damaging attack on the Internet. Even the CNN article admits the potential deadliness of this tactic, albiet without acknowledging the recent incident in question.
Before i go on, let me ask: do you know what that means? In case you don’t: Websites don’t really live at the addresses you are used to typing in for them; this one doesn’t really exist at a place named “crushingkrisis.com.” In reality, web-pages exist soley as a set of IP numbers … think of them as PO Box’s that have been set up to forward to your (more meaningful) full street address. DNS servers are what does the forwarding, linking those numbers to names like amazon.com, cnn.com, and whitehouse.gov. And, while there are many local servers around the world that maintain this address information, all of it originates from root servers — the ones that were attacked.
Based on that oversimplified explanation, it should be plain to see how the internet might slowly disintegrate into nothingness if a few more servers had been crippled, or if they had been damaged in a more permanent fashion. Even though sites would technically still work via their IP address, many sites (most blogs included) reference their links and images in such a fashion that they would be rendered useless without a domain name at their source. However, though “[t]his may have been the largest attack on the core of the Internet, it didn’t affect actual users” (Maguire, Newsfactor.com). This, as opposed to an extremely evident slowdown that left many pages totally unavailable this weekend, meant that its coverage was minimal at best
Can you imagine what would happen if the internet broke? Not just your own site, and not just every site you read, use to schedule classes, check email with, or do banking on. No. The whole thing. It would be a catastrophe! John U. S. Doe would find himself utterly helpless at work all day without being able to refer to stocks, research, or company intranets. Jane Americana Doe would be lost without her regular nightcap of Yahoo News. In short, the public should have been really, really, really freaked out by the 2002 attack, as well as this attack and what is implied by them both.
My local news outlets largely did not cover the attack last year. By rights, it should have been the most important story… certainly more significant than impending precipitation or a sports game. Instead i found out about it in class where, unsuprisingly, no one even understood its significance. This attack obviously got picked up by CNN because it affected business and, in an unusually potent turn, disabled some thirteen thousand ATMs. Meanwhile any garden variety email-communicable virus, which i have never once even approached catching in seven years of blithe internet usage, is cause for alarm and coverage. Why? Because it primarily affects the lowest common denominator. That’s what it all comes down.
You may not be able to tell if the chicken or the egg came first — the point is that they both need each other to exist. The same goes for the relative irrelevance of the news and the increasing idiocy of the American public — especially on issues of politics and technology. Individual news organizations should make a change by covering what’s important, and not what’s expected. You should make a change by giving a shit about what they’re telling you. And not telling you.
You know, it’s amazing how little actual blog reading i do. I mean, i could argue that i just don’t have the time, especially since i hardly get around to visiting the folks on my sidebar on a daily basis. But, two years ago i recognized the names of blogs, any blogs, even if it was only vaguely. It was like hearing the names of players from other city’s football teams, or teachers from another department. There was recognition, though, a vague flash of comprehension.
I definitely have lost that sense now, and reading through the Bloggie nominations i realize just how out of touch i have become with this community that i used to be involved with daily. It’s a little sad — if they are irrelevant to me than surely i am irrelevant to them. And, well, i deserve it, because i slacked off like a sorry ass all last year. I can still not like it though.
What is truely gratifying is this: usually i come to this realization and then surf around for about ten minutes before proclaiming that i don’t surf for a reason: all blogs are shit. This year… not so. In a fit of surfing, so far i’ve found a lot of gems, and i’m posting them as much for my sake as for yours (whoever you might be). You could spend the time sifting through all the nominations yourself, but since i am obsessed with only voting for things i have something to say about, i’ve got to do it anyway. Though, after reading a well-reasoned post from nominee A Small Victory, an editorial at Centrs.com, and seeing the full nominee list, i can say that i honestly don’t know if i care to vote one way or another. Still, some of these people are blogalicious…
UltraMicroscopic (well designed, professional, funny), Loobylu (an actual graphic arts professional sharing wonderful illustrations; up for best merch, best australian, & best designed), Bazima Chronicles (really masterful writing, hilarious, nominated for best merch & best american), Whedonesque (tasty news catchall for Buffy fans, best topical & best new), Picture Yourself (user submitted self-portraits, best non-blog content), How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons (who uses the word “heterosexualists” and teaches you how to speak swedish (and who i would gladly save from being hosted on blogspot), up for best european blog), 30 Days to a More Accessible Weblog (incredibly thought provoking and impeccably well written, up for best essay), longtime fav Torrez (most humourous), Kuroshin (not my favorite group-weblog, but check out the amazing recount of natural child-birth currently adorning the main page!), the mindbending design elements of Acerbia & Empty Bottle (best european and best asian, respectively) as well as SnazzyKat (best design, which is quite dazzling), blogging all-star and really nice lady JillMatrix (best GBLT), not to mention, of course, old standbys Kevin (best programming, MinJung (best GBLT & best tagline), and Erndawg (Best). Also, if you’re looking for fuller coverage, hit up EastWest Magazine for the E-Channel-style send-up!
Watch as six pounds of Roma Plastilina clay (hopefully) becomes a 1/2″ scale set for Prometheus Bound, neatly bound up in the form of an irregular polyhedron.
Either that, or i’ll wind up doing a Gumby and Pokey skit in Production class tomorrow…
Clay under my fingernails now, even after a thorough hand washing. Serves me right for taking a class that involves visual art.
Bill couched it carefully to me… Production Design… it would help my emerging directorial conception. Very useful for identifying and bringing forward the thematic elements of a play. Close textual analysis of a Greek tragedy of my choosing, as well as The Tempest. Assurances that my less-than-meager skills as an artist would not limit my academic success (and threaten my near 3.7 GPA).
All of the couching in the world, though, could not have stemmed my alarm at spending forty whole dollars in an art supply store this morning. As for the clay, well… i do have that GPA to protect.
The first project sounded fairly simple. Pick a geometric solid and create it in any medium of your choosing. Pick a play. Create all of your set-pieces out of that geometric solid so that they can be puzzled back together into it. Simple enough; i bought bricks of super-light clay. It still makes sense… it will never solidify, so i can tweak it up until the last minute, and it will be easy to squish back together if i make too awful of a shape. I choose an irregular polyhedron that resembled two pyramids crashing into each other — figuring that something essentially square would be much easier to deal with than something that resembled a multi-sided die.
There i was, thirty minutes ago, in my sculpting glory: making a sturdy rectangle of clay, marking off the lines i need to cut, slowly peeling away the outer layers until i was almost there — one more slanted side to uncover with a quick slip of my newly purchased modeling knife. And, slip it did, directly across the knuckle of my left thumb, leveling off the entire side of it.
To my credit, i did not panic, even when the innocuous-looking flattened side of my knuckle turned quickly into seeping red. I calmly held my hand away from the clay and finished the cut to complete my polyhedron, and then walked to the bathroom and scrubbed the clay off of my hands. I intermittently passed my thumb under the water, transfixed by the way the steady running stream carried away the blood, leaving my thumb looking perfectly fine except for a vague squareness.
Satisfied that i would not lose my appendage to some strange clay-based infection, i left the bathroom only to be faced by my unsteady geometric solid, all-but tottering in place amidst a pile of scraps. I could see my mistakes immediately… too rash in tracing the sides, my crashed pyramids looked more like rectangles caught in the act. So, before heading off in search of a bandage, i decided to piece my clay back together into a rectangle so that it would be ready for another try sometime tomorrow. There i sat, bleeding thumb held back away from my hand in an attempt to forget that it was conveniently opposable, pressing together the clay i had just so painstakingly cut apart.
And this is only 5% of my grade…