Saturday, 13 December 2014
MPAA vs. Pirates
"Leaked documents reveal in detail how Hollywood plans to take on piracy in the years to come. One of the top priorities for the MPAA are cyberlockers and illegal streaming sites, with lawsuits planned in the UK, Germany and Canada. Torrent sites are a medium priority, which the MPAA hopes to fight with criminal prosecutions, domain seizures and site blocking.
The Sony Pictures leak has caused major damage to the Hollywood movie studio, but the fallout doesn’t end there.
Contained in one of the leaked data batches is a complete overview of the MPAA’s global anti-piracy strategy for the years to come." (source)
Friday, 12 December 2014
Instructional Comics - How to Strip Your Baby
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| Source: Will Eisner, M16A1 Rifle: Operation and Preventative Maintenance (1969) |
Instructional Comics - Multiple Processes
Found this while investigating why Chrome runs so many chrome.exe files in Task Manager. Here was the answer, bright and clear, in a comic by none-other than Scott McCloud! Those Google kids know what they're doing.
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Philosophy and Life
Those familiar with ancient and late-antique Mediterranean
philosophical schools will probably also be familiar with the work of Pierre
Hadot, an historian of philosophy who ended his career at the College de
France. Hadot is famous (as much as any academic is ever famous) for treating
ancient philosophical schools as coherent ways of life. Platonism was a way of life. Aristotelianism
was a way of life. Stoicism was a way of life. Back then a student of
philosophy did not simply ask questions about the fields we delineate under the
categories of physics, metaphysics, and ethics for the sake of asking
questions. These investigations, and the answers characteristic to the various
schools, were not only guides to correct living, but exercises in themselves;
they molded the psyche of their practitioner so that it conceived of the world
in a way distinct from other schools. The leaders of these schools were far more
like priests of the Most High Good than they were like modern university professors. In
some cases, especially in the Platonic tradition, they approached the status of holy men.
In a very short radio broadcast, transcribed in Philosophical Chronicles, Jean-Luc Nancy
explores the act of philosophizing, contrasting it against the image of the
philosopher presented above. Asking whether or not philosophy gives form to
life, he determines that the question itself is about energy, about the difference
between Descartes and Heidegger. “In one case, one supposes that the order of
reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of
this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses
the problem of the passage from one order to the other.” Reasoning through concepts and ideas somehow
mobilizes life into a particular configuration or it does not. In the latter
case, we are speaking of two distinct forms of energy.
Nancy goes on to assert that this tension between ‘form’
and ‘life’ is necessarily internal to philosophy. Why? Because “a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of
both ‘form’ and ‘life’ understood as frame and content or even as signification
and experience…Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other,
or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against
the other, a tension without resolution.” Here Nancy efficiently twins a series
of words which roughly sum up human being: frame-form, content-life, signification-concept,
experience-intuition. Frame-form rests opposite content-life;
signification-concept opposite experience-intuition. The philosopher, in
thinking, thinks within and through and against and between the four polarized ends of this axis,
mixing and matching, transposing and contrasting. According to Nancy, this
tangle is the truth of life, which is “never simply available but is always
caught up in its own practice.”
“Thus philosophy is less a ‘form of life’ than life forming
itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over
every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life
thinking itself even in its death.”
We are reminded of Phaedo
now. Philosophy is practicing to die. We are also reminded of the later
Platonists who sought, through the practice of death, an ineffable and illuminating experience of Mind or
the One. But those goals are not what Nancy is attempting to describe, are they?
For Nancy, philosophy is a process that both produces itself and overcomes
itself. It is a fundamental quality of life-as-thinking, which is the necessary
life of humanity. Its purpose is to create and explore space in being. "Between religion and lived experience--in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art--philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such." According to Nancy, philosophy performs its work on the organization of society, on the investigation and cataloging of natural phenomena, and on the expression of lived experience. Like the ancients, Nancy's philosophy is an art of all arts.
Here we might infer Nancy’s evaluation of the philosophical schools
described by Hadot and other historians of ancient and late-antique philosophy. They were bad at making space between religion and lived experience. Why? Perhaps because their philosophy, their life-thinking, was focused overly on the future of life-ending or life-over. The foundations and ends of their frame-form and signification-concept were gods or God. In which case, Nancy's philosopher would be a modern invention, or--if we are being charitable--a full flowering of philosophy's potential. I would say that Nancy's philosopher is one who faces death much less often than the ancients and early moderns would have faced it. It is the philosophy of a life possessing social services.
Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that much of Nancy's most recent thought has concerned religion. Having written this out, I now see that, through thinking, he is attempting to create space not only between religion and life, but within religion itself, transforming that age-old thought barrier into philosophy as such.
I wish him luck and success.
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Fabiola - Part Four
He took note of her leisurely walking pace as she moved closer and closer towards him, and examined her gestures for signs of who she was below those folds of cloth and beneath that soft, tan skin. Would her hand always feel so warm? Would she notice him? She seemed to notice everything else around her, as her eyes moved slowly and carefully from objects to persons to the open windows above the busy street. The modest, silent girl he coveted at dinner and fantasied about at night had opened herself now. In this moment of revelation, he could see that something about the old beggar woman had troubled her. Thoughtful yet alert, she strolled by him, oblivious.
Fabiola, meanwhile, flanked by her anxious servants, was thinking about property. She was thinking about money. It reminded her of stories that she'd heard at dinner regarding the man across the sea who had submit himself to fatal torture in order to erase all debts. What a strange thing to have done, she thought. This seemingly endless debt won't be paid until the wandering gods themselves collapse from exhaustion, destroying Fortune. Before that day, man will continue to prey upon man. And bodies will continue to disembark from ships docked along a river silted with the hopeless, penniless dead.
It was in thinking such thoughts that Fabiola decided that she was going to sneak out of her room that night and see how those bodies lived.
Tuesday, 9 December 2014
Who Will Raid The Raiders?
Police in Sweden carried out a raid in Stockholm today, seizing servers, computers, and other equipment. At the same time The Pirate Bay and several other torrent-related sites disappeared offline. Although no official statement has been made, TF sources confirm action against TPB.
For many years The Pirate Bay has been sailing by the seat of its pants so any downtime is met with concern from its millions of users.
This morning, for the first time in months, The Pirate Bay disappeared offline. A number of concerned users emailed TF for information but at that point technical issues seemed the most likely culprit.
However, over in Sweden authorities have just confirmed that local police carried out a raid in Stockholm this morning as part of an operation to protect intellectual property.
“There has been a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm. This is in connection with violations of copyright law,” read a statement from Paul Pintér, police national coordinator for IP enforcement. (source)
Monday, 8 December 2014
Fabiola - Part Three
Fabiola paused and sighed, seeing now that she had drawn dangerous attention to this woman. Working with the merchant, they settled on a drab brown sack cloth. Fabiola then put some bronze coins in the woman's good hand, clasping it lovingly. "I'm sorry," she said. They looked into each other's eyes for a moment before parting.
Like rats trying to escape a sinking ship, she thought to herself, climbing over each other, leaving the weakest behind.
Thoughts like this kept her from noticing that she herself had been noticed during this exchange with the beggar woman. He too had visited the market that day. And he too remembered warmly their brief encounter at dinner the night previous.
Sunday, 7 December 2014
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