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I’m a fantasy baseball addict. I’ve been this way ever since I had to spend a winter alone in a two room apartment in Chicago. I’ve been a member of this league since the 2000 season.
While that might seem like a fair chunk of change, the league itself has been going since 1984. Your’s truly has been tasked with generating a logo worthy of commemorating this event. What does this say about the visual arts talent in the league?? Anyway, here‘s what I’ve been up to all morning.
This essay dovetails quite nicely with what I’ve been thinking w/r/t the current economic climate. The bizarre discounting of risk, the flood of money without anything concrete behind it. I got seriously interested in growth investment in the early/middle 90s but all the historical measures indicators like P/E ratio no longer seemed to apply. The algorithm I was learning could not effectively separate speculative from organic stock value. I stopped playing because I didn’t understand the rules. Since then I’ve watched the bubble shift across the economy into real estate and now in to commodities. There’s all this extra paper wealth and no extra physical wealth to back it up.
I don’t know if this is indicative of my own social climbing or of a broader societal trend, but when I was a wee lad only my crazy aunt and uncle had anything to do with any kind of securities investment. Saving for retirement meant socking away in a savings account and working for a pension. Seems that now everyone around me has some kind of 401(k)/IRA/blahblahblah with significant amounts of money introduced into the market. Myself included. Like there’s so much money available these days that businesses don’t know what to do with it. Instead of R&D or creating capital assets it seems all this money is tied up in illusory logic puzzles. I can see how it would be easier to juggle money than come up with and commit to a good use to put it behind.
I know the financial world has passed me by—it was never more than an interesting diversion, but what I do know leads me to believe that maybe the financial world shouldn’t have passed so far beyond me so rapidly after all.
Anyway, IANAE…just an ex-accounting student who ended up graduating with a degree in philosophy.
Nattering on a bit further. I originally wrote this as a post to Metafilter on this thread. In another instance of what is becoming a trend, I decided not to post it there. It is kind of speculative. It is light on facts. It is narrative. And these things are increasingly not appreciated there. Instead of introducing the idea and suffering the snark from the masses I just spend fifteen minutes crafting the damn thing and then hit the preview button. I read it a few times and then just close the browser tab. Mefi really is a lot less like the kaffeeklatsch it used to be.
Sleep. Glorious sleep is merely an hour away.
I shall sleep the sleep of the narcoleptic gods.
On the one hand, hooray for the wild things finding a place they can call their own. On the other, it would appear that human activities are worse than heavy doses of radiation. That’s mildly depressive to a woolly liberal treehugger like myself.
Chernobyl: Lost world – Independent Online Edition > Science & Tech
I’ve always loved Devo. Even when they, or what they’ve since become, strike an odd chord I knew what they were after. It’s always better to reach and fail than to not play at all. I’ve also annoyed friends and family and co-workers by pointing out Mothersbaugh or Devo bits that get injected into the sea of pop culture in which we try to keep our sanity afloat.
They came at the mainstream from a revolutionary angle. When the mainstream co-opted their position (as the mainstream always will when an angle attracts a following) they appeared to fold. I hate to use Iraq as an analogy, but it is apt here. Hussien’s power structure meekly folded in the face of obviously overwhelming force. The dispersal wasn’t a show of weakness however. It was a paradigm shift. The conflict moved to an asymetrical, insurgent / gorilla phase.
I think Devo pulled a similar maneuver whether consciously or not. By fading into the fabric of pop culture they are able to comment on and manipulate it in ways that are unavailable to someone on the outside. Mothersbaugh, in particular, seemed visionary in his creation of Mutata Muzika. De-evolutionary influence pervades all aspects of media these days. By ‘selling out’ Devo actually went all in. And it looks like they’re way ahead in this game.
Don’t believe me, read this article in the LA Weekly. The in-depth look at Mothersbaugh post-Devo and what that group of people have accomplished belies the treatment the band gets as a one-hit wonder.
Oh, and if you’re suitably impressed, there’s an appropriately de-evolutionary fan club that offers fun and gifts and the opportunity to ironically commercialize art through mass consumption of crafted oddities. I’m proud member 1221.
Do computer/desktop tech support in some way or another for long enough and eventually you’ll run across someone who exclaims or attributes a certain piece of technology to be magical. As of today I’ve decided the appropriate term is prestidigititzation.
A List Apart: Articles: A Preview of HTML 5 is a nice intro to HTML5 for those of you who haven’t been paying attention. I was among that group having spent more time looking at XHTML 1.1 and 2.0 development. The crossover with XML is the cooler set of toys in my mind.
I found myself cheering while reading this article. Can you believe there’s going to be semantic support for abstract page elements? How awesome is that? It just makes sense, no?
And then I got to the end of the article where the timeline puts HTML5 for the public somewhere near 2017 at the earliest. And then I cried.
Why can’t we have nice things?
You know what’s weird? Seeing a blog entry written by someone and having them reference you as “their boss.” Even if that is technically true—that person does work for me—it just gives me the willies. I never wanted to be anyone’s boss. I just want to write code and see what goofy crap can be conjured up out of a bunch of computers sharing files over a decentralized network.
Also weird? Wanting to go back to that time in Lincoln when I was noticeably hipper, younger, and ‘in the scene’ as it were. Can’t really hang out with the neo-bohemian set when you’re pushing the upper edge of your fourth decade on this planet. Conflict and contrast—the keys to artistic endeavor.
I’ve been following the ever-increasing Storm Worm phenomena since it’s arrival almost a year ago. I was originally impressed by the relative polish of its social engineering aspects. It has always seemed to me that all manner of phishing, social engineering, and general spam vectors have had some very obvious clues. It’s like the individual crafting the vector was dropping these signs as warnings to their clued-in brethren—as if it were all a practical joke on the n00bs.
Continue reading “The Coming Storm”
I am so friggin stuffed right now. I can barely surf the internet.