prillalar | The lunatic is in my head.

I've felt fairly boring lately, externally boring, I guess. The inside of my head is as interesting as ever it was, but I think I'm having an interface problem.

I was talking about that a bit with kestrelsan a few weeks back. How the best part of writing (or vidding or whatever) is the period after you've had the idea and you're researching and planning and outlining and just thinking. And the story exists in your head as those thoughts and feelings and moods and snatches of dialogue. But you have to get it down in your text editor.

And that's hard, because the interface for turning thoughts into language is clunky. Or that's how it feels to me. In a way, it reminds me of translation. From brain language into English. And there's no Allen and Greenough's New Brain Grammar.

I've done some reading on interface design and I found that it was not only applicable to making web applications, but also to most kinds of problems, especially social ones. You can move past what's wrong with me, what's wrong with you to what's wrong with the interface.

Lesson learned: you have to drink a lot of decaf if you want a buzz.

My co-worker on seeing an IMAX movie about whales: I was much more interested in finding out how they mate -- they're huge and they have no hands.

Monday night TV included one of my fave eps of Trailer Park Boys -- I'm Not Gay, I Love Lucy. Wait A Second, Maybe I Am Gay. Julian wants Ricky and Lucy to get married so they'll both stop bugging him. He figures he can convince Ricky to pop the question if he tells him people are beginning to say that Ricky is gay, since he hasn't married Lucy yet.

Ricky, in his usual brilliant way, starts to wonder if he is gay. (He's not.) And if he's gay, Julian must be too. But everything gets straightened (heh) out eventually.

Adding and Subtracting - a body art interview. Be sure to read to the very bottom of the page. (Or at least scroll down.)

ETA: Sorry, guys, I should have been more clear about the above link. 1. It's squicky. 2. It's not real. (Check the posting date on the bottom of the page.) I just thought it was really clever and funny.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oh, that article was squicky!

Aeh. I think I'm going to be sick. No, really.

RYAN: Dave wears contacts; he's vain.

The irony is killing me here. I might have to go lie down.

wow.

you know I have to say that I am very ambivalent about heavy body-mod. Part of me is horrified and part of me is "faster pussycat! Kill! Kill!". I mean it's definitely a kind of artistic commitment that I find kind of awe-inspiring. And visually I love looking at bodies that are different. And then there is just the sensation of coming up against my visceral horror. I mean it's such a wierd emotion for me to have. What *is* that? What is horrifying me? Is it cultural? Is it personal? Is it reflexive?

My first memorable experience of that kind of horror was the scene in O, Lucky Man where Malcolm MacDowell is in the hospital and he's wandering around and comes into a room where a man is moaning pitiously and he whips off the sheet covering him and we see that the man's head has been transplanted onto the body of a sheep. I *still* shudder.

So maybe it's psychological on my part. Maybe I have a "wierd transplant" phobia.

Anyway, I don't know, but in a sense I think this makes the "art" part of what they are doing very successful to me -- they have disturbed me and made me think. Please post when they do the genital surgery. And thanks! this was very thought provoking and nicely distracting from exam-hell. *g*

hmph. Mr. Spike thinks it's a hoax. But I don't think so. What do you think?

I do. That's what I meant by "scroll down to the bottom of the page". It was posted on April 1, 1999. Perhaps I should edit my entry to be more clear on that.

It was just such a cool hoax.

Even though this particular article isn't real, you make some good points about extreme body mod. It's the commitment of it that I find fascinating. When you change yourself, it's permanent.

I suppose all art changes the artist, but with body mod it's a physical, visible change.

I wonder what it is about striking differences that makes us unable to look away. Like the more things deviate from the patterns in our brains that say "normal" the more we look. Maybe it's a defense thing that was evolved in us: flagging the unusual so we're aware of it.

And now I want to get a tattoo.

Saw, and fell for, that article a couple of years ago. (:

Regarding the boring brain thing: I feel your ennui. You know you like yourself, there's cool stuff going on under there, but you just can't get at it. All you can generate is the mental equivalent of a nasal hum.

When I feel like that, I try to have a conversation with somebody I find exciting.

I want one of those New Brain Grammars though.

The lunatic is in my head.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject