January 18, 2008 at 7:35 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
I am a creative person and like many of that ilk, my level of organization is also creative — to put it kindly. Productivity is a trait that I admire and occasionally accomplish quite well, but it is often hampered by the fact that I seldom have much of a plan. For instance: at some point near the end of this month, I will sit down and pay the bills. I will probably approach this task differently then the last time I did it. It’ll all get done but in a different order and manner, which is not the best way to approach finances.
To solve this problem I’ve decided to create a document, a User Guide for me and my life. Also, in order to make this productivity project interesting, this User Guide will be more than just about how to pay the bills. It will be a self-portrait.
It’s been a while since I’ve created a self portrait. In some ways this blog is a self portrait; however, mostly it is just a stage. A real self portrait involves honestly peering into one’s self and painting, drawing, sculpting, or writing an representation of what you find.
“Colin, a User Guide” will be my self-portrait, an non-chronological autobiography. It will be a reference guide to every thing I do from paying the bills to the blogs I read to the daily tasks at work to the routes I take on my bicycle. It will be a detailed description of how I approach life, death, politics, beauty, art, culture, and friendships. It’ll be a catalog of all the hopes, dreams, regrets, and desires that shape me and propel me through life.
I will be designing this as an actual user guide with easy to follow instructions and call out tips. If anyone were to need to become me this document should get them pretty far. Which may come in handy if I get hit by a bus one of these days. [note to self: include a Living Will as part of the book’s appendix]
In order to make this a true self portrait, I will be honest with myself as I write this. Which means that there will be parts of the book I won’t want people to see. As such, I will be creating two editions: the public version with sections redacted and the private edition encrypted under lock and key which includes the personal and financial details I’d rather not share with the world.
Initially, this book will be developed as a PDF; however, I am also interested in actually getting this printed. A private edition for myself and a short limited edition run of the public edition. I have already designed a cover and started on an outline. The process of creating this book should be interesting, and I will post updates to this blog as I work on it.
May 31, 2007 at 2:42 pm · Filed under Minds, Brains, & inbetween + Art Freak Culture + Life, Meaning, & Selfhood + Politics
For those of you too busy to keep abreast of the latest internet kurfluffle, the LiveJournal community has been in a bit of an uproar over the mass deletion of journal accounts and communities. It seems in the rush to “protect children” Barak Berkowitz, chairman and chief executive of Six Apart, got a bit carried away.
“Our decision here was not based on pure legal issues. It was based on what community we want to build and what we think is appropriate within that community and what’s not.”
–Barak Berkowitz, chairman and CEO, Six Apart
As with any broad swipe based on keywords, several child abuse survivor help groups and the like also got deleted in the process. The chairman has apologized for this and I’m sure this regrettable bit of collateral damage will be rectified.
However, more unknown is the status of the gray area content such as the slash fiction communities that got the cut. Slash fiction is SciFi/Fantasy/Comic fan fiction where one or more fictional characters has a sexual romp with another in all it’s lavishly detailed glory. It’s not really my cup of spanish fly, but whatever floats your panties.
That danged first amendment… or Liberals have morals?
Here in lies the problem of course, not everyone shares my liberal ambivalence with slash fiction and other harmless fetishes. Obviously most BoingBoing readers do as evidence by this hard-line first amendment quote:
“So the only policy that’s safe from turning into tyranny is to allow all speech, no matter how uncomfortable it makes you. Yes, people could be harmed; yes, even children. Freedom is more important.”
This stance nicely exemplifies the definition of liberal morality put forth by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt: The moral foundations theory, put forth by Haidt, states that there are five innate psychological morality systems. Liberals base most of their morals on the measure of Harm/Care and Fairness/Reciprocity; whereas, conservatives balance these with the foundations of Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. This also can be described as a tendency to base morality on a individual rights basis versus a structural community basis. For more on this, I highly highly suggest you watch the fascinating video talk of Haidt on morality at the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
Rationality comes late to the game
Haidt also is known for his hypothesis that morality is largely instinctual and any rational statements are all developed post-hoc. This doesn’t mean that it is in-born only that one learns morality through mostly subconscious socio-emotional means rather than rational means. For more on this read “The Emotional Dog and its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment [PDF] and/or The Believer magazine’s interview with Haidt.
Haidt’s ideas are very interesting and they explain a lot more than George Lakoff’s strict father/nurturant parent model of conservative vs. liberal morality. Lakoff also has a lot of interesting things to say, but I’ve always been a bit skeptical of it’s veridicality because the metaphor is too convenient.
In any case, no matter which morality theory you side with, it’s obvious that conservatives and liberals have very different flavors of morality. If we want to develop a communication between the two sides, rather than pure chest pounding, we need both sides to better understand one another—and themselves. This stands true whether we are ones to fantasize about the Jesus references in Narnia or the homosexual subtext of Sam and Frodo.
April 12, 2007 at 12:30 pm · Filed under Art Freak Culture
That tipping point called death has turned a living legend into a legend. Kurt Vonnegut died last night at the age of 84, and from his appearance on the daily show in 2005, it is obvious that he remained a cranky sarcastic iconoclast up until the very last.
His stories were wild mixtures of science fiction and autobiography. Who knows maybe Slaughterhouse 5 had more truth then we realized. Maybe he’s up there on some distant planet in the future living it up with a buxom woman and being catered on by disembodied aliens. No matter where he is in time, his body is gone but his voice is still with us through his books, which were an idiom all their own.
Actually I correct myself—he’s more than a legend. His name is a metaphor for the idiom he created and lived. Vonnegut is cemented in our language as something more than just a name, which is really one of the highest honors any writer can hope to achieve.
Official Kurt Vonnegut Site
NPR: Vonnegut Remembered
Boing Boing: Kurt Vonnegut, RIP
Wikipedia bio of Kurt Vonnegut
p.s. unsurprisingly the blog-o-sphere is alive with remembrance posts.
