Straw Dogs are from Mercury?

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I get so confused now I am in my dotage.

Come back from CeBIT blurry-eyed and bamboozled, only to fire up Bloglines and find that John Gray – author of the laser-guided mememissiles “Straw Dogs” and “Al Queda and what it means to be modern” is also the author of cheesy self-help tome: “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus” and the centre of a controversy.

From The Guardian’s review of “Straw Dogs”:

“John Gray’s political vision has been steadily darkening. Once a swashbuckling free-marketeer, he has, in his recent studies, become increasingly despondent about the state of the world. With the crankish, unbalanced Straw Dogs, he emerges as a full-blooded apocalyptic nihilist. He has passed from Thatcherite zest to virulent misanthropy.

Not that nihilism is a term he would endorse. His book is so remorselessly, monotonously negative that even nihilism implies too much hope. Nihilism for Gray suggests the world needs to be redeemed from meaninglessness, a claim he regards as meaningless. Instead, we must just accept that progress is a myth, freedom a fantasy, selfhood a delusion, morality a kind of sickness, justice a mere matter of custom and illusion our natural condition. Technology cannot be controlled, and human beings are entirely helpless. Political tyrannies will be the norm for the future, if we have any future at all.”

Or if you prefer:

“This powerful and brilliant book is an essential guide to the new Millennium. Straw Dogs challenges all our assumptions about what it is to be human, and convincingly shows that most of them are delusions
— J.G.Ballard”

Not exactly self-help. Or maybe the best type of all if you’re of a gnostic persuasion…

Anyway.

I have had it explained to me that people can have the same name and be completely different people.

Like Donna Summer, for instance.

Good news for MySociety

moleitau

From the Guardian Onlineblog:

“it’s just won a cool £250,000 in funding from the office of the deputy Prime Minister. Glasses are, I suspect, being raised, even as I type…”

Whooo! Well done Tom(s), James(s) and all involved in mySociety

It’s because it’s got such a good logo of course. 😉

What could you do with a chainsaw?

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From an amazing story about a woman who moved to a small island off the coast of Finland:

“I had to build a new jetty. I modelled it after others that I had seen. I cut down trees from the forest, and built a chest – a wooden frame – at the end of the jetty, which I filled with stones”, she says on the shore. “It isn’t hard to build a jetty. All you need is a chain saw and a brain.”

Which got me to thinking, what would I be able to reverse-engineer in my mind from memory? Anything? I’m going to try and give myself a quiz, and ask Foe to name 3 things which I then have to sketch the workings of from memory, and perhaps then how I would go about constructing them.

The island-living lady in the story works as a translator over the internet, but it’s not clear as to how much she relies on the net as a source of knowledge to be able to live alone in such a remote place.

I’ve thought before about the web, moblogs and stolen knowledge – collecting your memories of things, proceedures, recipes, constructions through your phone might result in not just a lifeblog, but a life-or-deathblog. Of course, in such situations, it might just be easier to use your mobile phone to give Ray Mears a call…

» Helsinki Sanomat: Living alone on a small island in the Turku archipelago

Watch your mouth kid, or you’ll find yourself floatin’ home.

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Aevil invokes Star Wars in a rant inspired by the rather cliched story in the NYT about “dour, repressed” Finns:

“The article is full of stereotypes and it confuses suppressing emotions with being taciturn. Non-Finns seem to take particular offense at this cultural difference but I find the silence is one of the most endearing features of Finnish culture…

…Imagine, if you will, the young Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. The young Anakin and Luke were both in touch with their feelings, both lovesick puppies making an ass out of themselves and generally blithering idiots whom the force would have done well to seal their gaping, whining oral cavities. Darth Vader on the other hand was a guy dressed in a stylish black ensemble, like many Finns and, aside from the heavy breathing, spoke only occasionally in a basso profundo voice. Darth was in touch with his feelings as he reached out to Luke to inform him that he was his father and then later that he would die. Darth was a no-frills, in touch with his inner dark side kind of guy. Quiet, thoughtful, no whining. Who would you rather share a land speeder with, whiny Luke or wheezing Darth? No contest, really.”

I have to agree with her. The Finns I have met have been funny, thoughtful and very good company. The signal-to-noise ratio is just very high, and that actually does wonders for one’s well-being I find. However, rather than following Aevil’s suggestion and embracing my inner interstellar genocidal mystic-fundamentalist psychopath; I think I’ll go for nuturing my inner Wookie.

Just Links

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Sorry I can’t think of any more bad Zelda puns…. but…

  • Master Sword forged!!! [thanks Lee!]
  • Lifeblogwatch
  • Opportunitygrrl, because even interplanetary probes need LJbuddies

    “OMG, I am soooo dusty and disgusting right now!! I have red grime everywhere, especially under my abrasion instruments! It’s no wonder I can’t grind anything! I find evidence of past water, but I can’t even find a puddle to splash my treads in here! I so need a shower. And a manicure. OMG, what if Stardust saw me like this?!”

    [via memepool]

  • “Interview with Microsoft’s typography master”:

    “He’s studying how to use multiple screens. In his office he has a second monitor — a projector on the wall — running full time. He uses this second monitor differently from his main high-res monitor. In his studies of human perception he learned that the periphery vision is more attuned to movement. So, he puts his email and his alerts on this second screen.”

  • I want to go to GEL
  • Big but bonkers indescribable flash movie by Sonia Peng

Post-user, post-consumer

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Consumer is a horrible word. User is not much better. Gene at Fredshouse.net:

“…for me it conjures up pictures of a pale, trembling arm with a needle full of smack (YMMV, of course ;-). Of course many of the folks who sell to the “consumer” have almost exactly that metaphor in mind as their success model, but let’s not go there.

A colleague here at Nokia suggest a simple substitute for both words, after hearing me whine one-time-too-many about the usage of ‘consumer’.

He suggested “Individual”.

Does that work? A quick mental search-and-replace as a test:

  • User-centred design = Individual-centred design
  • Consumer electronics = Electronics for individuals
  • Consumer awareness = Individual’s awareness
  • User interface = Interface to an individual

Hmmm. 7/10 maybe. A bit tricky to construct replacement phrases, so can’t really see it taking off.

Of course the real difficulty with replacing ‘consumer’ and ‘user’ in commercial discourse is that they are words which make it easier for those of us designing or communicating with individuals or customers to objectify them; keep ourselves separate and aloof from them – perhaps necessary in some respects (“you are not your audience” etc.) and harmful in others.

Any thoughts?