April 2008

Just left this comment for Marisa Olson on Rhizome. The topic was her review of the Double Happiness* blog:

Hi, Marisa,
Good summation of what Dubhap and other surf clubs do ("is chock-a-block with the fruits of inordinately long websurfing sessions: frayed gif mashups, hilarious if sometimes unnerving audio loops, shameless resizes calling for inconsistent page widths, ekphrastic word/image paradoxes, and very often beautiful collages of similar images (graffiti tags, gummi bears, umbrella hats... Google Image Searches are their friend)")
Am curious, though--Why did you never write this kind of formal exegesis about Nasty Nets, on Nasty Nets, as a member of Nasty Nets?
Or, put another way,
Why is it that everyone talks like an 18 year old in the comment sections of the surf club blogs?
Lots of surf clubbers aren't 18 and can write very well. There seems to be an unspoken convention that only "Dude" and "You rule" are appropriate language for comments.
It's OK to have the formal "one-way," print-style writing on Rhizome but it would be nice if it could be the beginning of an equally articulate conversation in comments (or passing between blogs) rather than just drive-by props*.
Best, Tom

*commendations

Update: No response to this other than a joke from someone (not Olson) about the unruly internet.

*Update, 2011: The Rhizome link has been changed to http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/9/let-it-spin/

These photos are from MSNBC, not the Onion:

After the 9/11/01 attacks a bunch of smart people said it wouldn't be a good idea to invade Afghanistan and Iraq because then those countries would become US colonial possessions and those are never easy to manage and having such possessions would make us no safer. This turned out to be the case. Now the US is stuck trying to run those countries without enough troops to do it so they have to use our tax dollars to hire people from abroad. Lots of those people understandably can't be trusted to help us manage our colonies so here's the Defense Department's solution: a handheld lie detector to be used for screening non-US personnel. If there is a problem, American knowhow can always come up with a space gizmo* that wouldn't be admissable in our own courts but would cow our colonial subjects exposed to movies like Men in Black. Trying to come up with a word to describe this device and its intended uses the best Unqualified Offerings could come up with was "evil." That will work.

*that uses algorithms and stuff

Somewhat related to the "infinite fill" blog posts from 2004: illustrated essay on the connections between MacPaint computer fill patterns and Memphis plastic laminate designs. (thx travis) The links are mostly visual and zeitgeisty--it's not like Mac hired Memphis designers to do MacPaint patterns or the designers used Macs. Ettore Sottsass, it is explained, had a history of working with computers (his design for a mainframe interface depicted in the essay is extremely tasty). But whether he used MacPaint is something the essay just speculates about. The computer designs by Memphis-ers depicted in the essay all predate MacPaint.