Jakob Has Had Enough
After reading my mom’s post on shutting down her tumblelog, I can’t help but agree, and it’s time for me to end this.
It’s not about Tumblr, specifically. It’s about the web in general. It’s become overrun by too many animals.
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The absolute worst, though, has got to be the attacks for any display of self-confidence. You may conceptualize the Unites States as a great nation. But it’s also a big tribe, with its own irrational taboos. One of them is: don’t talk proudly about your achievements.
Unfortunately, my line of work requires me to aim high. If you can’t stomach that, fine, but consider the long-term effects of bashing me and others who goals are to innovate. Entrepreneurs, artists — our jobs are not easy; they require doing something new. This means we assume risk — our business could go bankrupt, our art could be despised. Perhaps you are happy with the current state of USA. I am not — I am deeply unhappy with it — and I want to change it.
But going forward, Jakob Lodwick, the person, is withdrawing from the public web. You will see the results of my efforts through Normative and other companies. I just cannot deal with these animals any longer.
I can see both sides. People can be extremely cruel when they smell a foul scent. He may be a nice person in person, but it’s true that the web brings out different sides of ourselves. The offensive / defensive system surrounding Jakob bring out the worst in both him and the people who are attacking him.
I suggest that we all read / be people that look for places and communities that bring out the best in us rather than the worst. It’s part of the reason why I stopped writing on Livejournal and moved to Tumblr and Vox. Different audiences, different dynamics. I don’t think he’ll stay away for long, but I do hope he finds / creates a new dynamic that helps him be self-expressive, good-intentioned, appreciated, etc, and that brings out the best in him.
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Barack Obama on Economics: 'We're Going Through a Big Shift' - WSJ.com →
“We’ve got this new problem: The biggest problem with our tax code when it comes to the business side is that we have one of the highest tax rates — corporate tax rates — on paper but our effective tax rate is one of the lowest … You know, how much you pay in taxes as a corporation a lot of times is going to depend on how good your lobbyist is, as opposed to any sound economic theories. So those distorting effects I’d like to actually remove and eliminate from our tax system, but obviously that’s a complicated and difficult task.”
Very impressive interview with Barack about some details of the economy. I like hearing about the details, and having confidence in the answers rather than cynicism or skepticism.
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"Why Doesn't He Just Use His Cell Phone?"
A common screenwriting mantra is “Force your character up a tree, throw rocks at him; then get him down again.” I try to watch movies with an eye to the tree and the rocks, taking note of the techniques writers use to generate desperate situations for their characters. Lately, I’ve noticed that writers of action and suspense films and TV shows are encountering an amusing new storytelling problem: How to explain why their protagonist doesn’t just use his cell phone to get him out of a predicament.
For the entire history of film, characters have found themselves alone in desperate circumstances, with no possible solution except using their wits to escape. These days, a litany of archetypal pickles find themselves easily solvable with the press of a few buttons. Lost? Kidnapped? Held hostage? Tied up? Trapped? What’s the problem? Whip out the Razr.
The recent thriller The Strangers, in which intruders terrorize a couple in a rural country home, dedicates nearly ten full minutes to ruling out cell phones as an option. Action-oriented scripts are full of these awkward, forced moments of exposition. A character’s cell phone conveniently runs out of power, gets no signal for no reason, is broken, dropped, or lost at the precise moment that he finds himself up that “tree.”
Comedies have it a little bit easier; they can turn it into a joke. On a recent episode of The Simpsons, Homer finds himself - disguised as a cow - headed for certain death in a meatpacking plant. Right before he accidentally enters the plant, he calls Marge to let her know that the plan is working perfectly so far. He then adds, slowly and exaggeratedly: “Now I’m turning off my cell phone to save the battery.”
I wonder what William Shakespeare would have come up with if Juliet had been able to simply blow up Romeo’s Sidekick and explain that she was going to fake her death. Who’d have thought that these convenient little devices would throw such a noticeable wrench into the gears of centuries of storytelling conventions?
Signs that as a culture we’re becoming more like an organism. Few people are truly cut off from the rest of the body, and with the body’s defense mechanisms people are safer from potential attacks.
Slightly related, I was thinking about how we might be the first generation of people that is bombarded with images of ourselves, photographs, videos, stories from other perspectives, etc. And when we’re saturated with images of ourselves, we see ourselves differently than we would otherwise. We see ourselves more as others see us. And I think this creates an even bigger generation gap than age would normally produce alone.
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“I’ve been single for seven years and as I get older, I think all I want is to be loved. The world becomes a place where you think, let everyone else have it. Let them all fight over jobs and money … You want things in life that are lovely.”
Alec Baldwin to NY Post (via aja)
I both agree and disagree with this on several levels.
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Post
Name something that is bigger and better than you but that could also benefit from your support.Fun with censor bars. An incredibly original and creative music video by The BPA- The BPA ‘Toe Jam’ Feat. David Byrne and Dizzee Rascal.
I felt a little embarrased watching this at work! More than some other videos that would be considered not safe for work.
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I might be wrong but the old iPhone is a beautiful metal object and the new iPhone looks like a scratch-prone plastic phone with 3G and GPS.
I was thinking the opposite about scratch-proniness. The metal backing scratches really easily and I thought the plastic would be more resistent. Also, how many times has the slick metal surface caused the iPhone to slip out of my hand into Lake Washington or into the gutter. Many.
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slice of life
What do I really want with this whole 8:36pm.com idea anyway? What’s the desired end result? I messed around with the most obvious functionality this last weekend, but it is leaving me with a feeling of not quite getting the full picture. I think I need to start with the core feeling of amazement around the slice of life idea. That feeling of capturing life in a slice, and then sharing that slice.
Jimmy Livingston’s site captures that. Maybe its because of the breadth of the years flowing by. Maybe it’s because of the quality of old Polaroids.
I have a couple problems. One is that it’s not clear whether this is about Twittering or Flickr photos. I realize that the idea started with Twittering, but I think the experience and end product is a lot better through photos. Who cares really about a line of text written every day. A photo says so much more. Especially if it includes a caption and a location. But not everyone has a cameraphone, including Kellianne (and Chadwick, whose idea I borrowed).
Which view is better. Everyone who took a photo on a particular day, or every photo that a particular person took. Which tells a better story? Or are they both equally compelling.
“Our emotions must be in the right amount, proportional to the event that called them forth; they must be expressed at the right time, in a way that is appropriate to the emotional trigger and the circumstancese in which it occurred; and they must be expressed in the right way, in a way that does no harm.”
long live the first emotion
Also, I have to say something about emotions. A child feels all emotions fully, without constraint, without the layer of emotion management that occurs as they slowly learn about manners, society, and in general get socialized. As adults, we have our initial emotions, and then a layer of management emotions, second emotions, that help us control the first emotion.
Emotions though have a bad reputation. We are usually trying to manage our negative emotions: anger, fear, contempt, disgust, sadness… rather than accentuate our positive emotions. The Dalai Lama talks about destructive emotions.
What about the constructive, creative, life-giving emotions? Is it possible to manage emotions without in some ways taking the pleasure away from them as well? This is my primary complaint with Buddhism and self-improvement strategies in general. In order to control ourselves, to know ourselves, to be attentive to ourselves, we have to distance ourselves from our core. And this distancing may be education, but it is also irreversibly numbing. We are leaving the garden of emotions.
There has to be another answer. Something that is about expression rather than management. Because that first emotion is often much less violent and harmful than the secondary emotion, which is why the secondary emotion can often overtake it and control it. It’s violent and aggressive and overkill. But that initial emotion may have been soft and vulnerable, or sad, or longing. Long live the first emotion.
a week on my own
I’ve got low energy and it’s worrying me. So low that I almost can’t even rally. It’s not necessarily low morale even, it’s just the feeling of having my energy past the point of self-replenishing. As if I’ve depleted the energy I usually use to give away and have dipped into my own personal store of energy. I need to replenish that and also stock up a bit more for the giving away.
I have been feeling distant from Kellianne, through no fault of her own. She’s been feeling under the weather (literally and figuratively) and not her best lately. And I feel like it’s my responsibility to keep her morale high, but when I don’t have the energy it turns into a bit of an emotional sink for both of us. Also, it’s silly to feel responsible for the weather. We both want to be rallied, and neither of us has the energy. Where does this kind of energy come from?
I think it comes from sense of self. From being healthy, knowing yourself, liking yourself, feeling good, feeling appreciated by yourself and others. On my last run I was turning over the phrase “I love where I am” and could feel whether or not my subconscious agreed with it. It’s strange how you can say something and your body gives you feedback on the validity of that statement. It’s a self-lying protection program.
I’m continuing on my program of trying to bring my sense of self back into my own possession. Trying to play boomerang with a sense of self is not only unreliable, but inaccurate. Only we know ourselves, only we’re close enough to ourselves to know our own motives, and therefore only we know whether or not we are truly good inside. Everything about law, and morals, and justice, and judgement is flawed because we cannot know the mind of another person. However, it’s all valid when applied to ourselves. However, we have to know ourselves, and trust ourselves in order to have anything work.
I want to start a program with myself that is about learning to know myself. Who are my role models and what is my vision for my own future? What kind of lifestyle do I want? Kellianne and I talk a lot about lifestyles. What kind we want. We should work lifestyle visions into our vows. In fact, that might be a good place to start regarding some of the stories we want to tell and promises we want to make to each other.
Lifestyle appreciation. Lifestyle improvement. What goes in to improving a lifestyle. How is it different from home improvement and self improvement? How is it different from etiquette and philosophy and everything else that gives a set of rules regarding how to live. It could be the creative constraint that we are truly trying to maximize.
I want to think about this some more. Lifestyle.
solar powered moods
Kellianne left for her one-week-every-six-weeks trip to NYC this morning, and so now I’ve got a week on my own again. The last week or so I’ve been feeling very low-energy, unable to even do the minimum that’s expected of me. On top, everyone in Seattle seems to be feeling the same way. Most people are blaming the weather. And that’s probably what’s affecting them, but I think my problem is one degree from that. The people that are being affected by the weather are affecting me. I get most of my energy from the people around me, I think, as Carinna also pointed out, and I think I’m feeling the drain from people rather than from the skies. In the end, it’s all the same though right? Just like how all energy comes from the sun, whether it gets transported through plants and animals before it gets to me doesn’t really change the fact that I’m solar-powered like everyone else.The Democratic primary in 8 minutes.THIS is web video done right. Wow.
Holy crap, yeah. This is superb.
I like the sound effects.
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emotional triggers
Reading more of Paul Ekman’s Emotions Revealed and it’s slowly changing the way I think about emotions and moods and self-medication etc.
Rather than think about what your current mood or emotion is (and he makes a distinction between the two by saying a mood lasts several minutes to several days while an emotion lasts a split second to a couple minutes), it’s interesting to think about what triggers you to have an emotion.
It’s weird to watch myself for a day and try to notice when my emotions are “triggered” and then to go back and try to find what they were triggered by. He mentions a “refactory” period after an emotion is triggered where your brain shuts out any information that might contradict the new emotion… it’s a period of time where the emotion gets to reign, make up reasons for existing, find a reaction, and act on the emotion. There’s not a whole lot of self-awareness during this time. You are in an emotion zone and it rides itself out. Sort of like a rant, but it can be for any strong emotion.
The refactory period makes it difficult to think objectively about the trigger because the emotion makes you believe that it is fully justified and real and it would be a crime to pretend that the reaction was at all misguided or unnecessary.
I get triggered by things like tones of voice, or issues such as temperature, or smell. Sometimes a word, sometimes a look on a face. And then I find myself responding with my own tones, words, expressions and I can’t help it.
It’s not that I want to remove emotional triggers, I just want to understand them better. Average conversations then become rich material for paying attention to how I’m being triggered, and by what, and how the reactions unfold from those triggers.