http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:emortalcoil&section=today deviantART RSS for by:emortalcoil en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Thu, 17 Dec 2009 05:47:59 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28974208/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28974208/ Wed, 16 Dec 2009 04:23:00 PST [link]

Occasionally I get criticized for spending so much time in my "own little world". Who knows- perhaps the world would be sooooo much better if I didn't do that. But that seems doubtful. Yes, there are times when I feel lonely. And, yes, I waste almost obscene amounts of time on stuff like watching TV and on-line games; it's a way to fill a void that would otherwise be spent doing....what, exactly? Discussing the weather? Having ultimately pointless arguments with someone about subjects like global warming? Maybe I should be spending that time collaborating on a new national health plan.

But the fact remains that quite often I prefer solitude. Some of the most enjoyable Christmas Eves I've had were while I was in grad school when I opted to spend them by myself. One of those evenings was almost marred by my ex phoning me and suggesting that he come over and restart the relationship. It seemed a rather odd thing for him to do at the time-- he's the one who put me on a shelf-- but after reading Fowler's piece I suppose it meant he would prefer spending Xmas Eve with someone he doesn't respect (he explicitly told me as much once) than find ways to amuse himself for an evening. I turned down his offer because I preferred being with myself to being with him again. And *that*, apparently, makes me something of a weirdo.

Perhaps it's the making of choices that makes a difference. Would Fowler have felt so unhappy in '05 if she had made an active choice about how to spend her time?

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28752977/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28752977/ Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:57:00 PST Cheest, Mother, replied Llewellyn.
Llewellyn and his mother understood each other."
-Ogden Nash

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28067557/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/28067557/ Sat, 31 Oct 2009 13:43:29 PDT
-Tu Wei-Ming

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/27942868/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/27942868/ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 14:17:59 PDT
And I keep thinking about it. It seems so odd that anyone would do that in this country and in this day and age. And then I wonder if there's something wrong with me for thinking that. And then I wonder what was it about *me* that prompted the offer? Was she making that offer to every pedestrian she came across today?

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/26657261/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/26657261/ Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:58:16 PDT
]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/26136209/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/26136209/ Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:24:39 PDT
]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/25100763/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/25100763/ Wed, 03 Jun 2009 03:54:47 PDT
Have started physical therapy for the shoulder and see an ortho about my back in a few weeks. Taking drugs to deal with the pain is not my idea of a solution and I'm hoping that with the PT I can drop the drugs.

Art? Yeah. Not much though. Mostly thinking about potential projects rather than actually doing anything about them. This weekend if there's both energy and time I'll see how far one can get sewing a shitagi (using a medium green, cotton fabric; no plans to embroider the finished garment). If that goes well then I may focus more on sewing/embroidery for awhile.

29 June 09 update: Finished the shitagi. Took about a day and a half. Forgot a few things about constructing these things since the last time I made a kimono (which was somewhere around a decade or so ago) but it's good enough. Now to make the obi. Or start another embroidery project. Or something.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/23143888/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/23143888/ Wed, 11 Feb 2009 17:46:08 PST
[link]

Sound file is a tad muddy at one point but on the whole it was fun listening. Reminded me of Weird Al for some reason despite the lack of accordians.

On a related note: lately I've been listening to a series of recorded lectures about the historical development of American musicals. It's not as boring as the subject might suggest and has enhanced my enjoyment of ragtime in unanticipated ways. And by putting various genres of musical performance in a historical perspective it helps me to understand really weird stuff a tad better. Seems even T.S. Eliot used references to what was then pop music in his poems...making fun of it, of course.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/22890770/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/22890770/ Thu, 29 Jan 2009 17:44:36 PST
BTW, can someone explain to me why some people seem to have this need to find something to contradict? It's such a f*cking drag that it seems like nearly every time i open my mouth this one person has to find *something* about what I said to correct. It really leaves me feeling like there's no point in saying anything at all--why try to communicate when all i get for my efforts is a put down? I'd find the company of a brick wall more enjoyable.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/21617719/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/21617719/ Sat, 22 Nov 2008 16:48:19 PST
Consider it an exercise in making wavy lines.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/21042308/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/21042308/ Sat, 18 Oct 2008 05:49:10 PDT
]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/20004535/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/20004535/ Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:51:59 PDT
So why do i do it? What's the message? The message is i can't be bothered to screw around with coordinating colors. Black coordinates with everything and matching clothes is one less thing to deal with. The message is i'd rather not have to go out and buy new clothes every few weeks because the blood strains won't come out of the old ones. The message is that i'm sufficiently irritated by people who say that i resemble my mother that wearing clothes that in no way resemble her pink gingham pantsuits is one of the ways that i remind them that i'm not her clone.

Now you know.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/18988497/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/18988497/ Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:30:45 PDT
]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/17604099/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/17604099/ Mon, 31 Mar 2008 10:49:06 PDT
[link]

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/15913653/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/15913653/ Thu, 13 Dec 2007 06:45:11 PST
Mr Kreider, ranting about the Mohammed Teddy-bear thing:

"We in the west are performing the experiment, for the first time in human history, of living without faith. And we’re a mess. We’re heavily medicated and in therapy, we’re addicted to anything we can get our hands on, fucking everything that moves, buying tons of ugly useless shit no one could possibly need, and making up wonky, jerry-rigged or retrofitted new religions even stupider thank the old ones, all in a desperate effort to stop feeling so empty and afraid. I love us. I think we are heroic, even if we’re doomed. We are up against people who suffer no such spiritual malaise: they are flush with clear-eyed certitude, they think they know the mind and will of God, and they are wrong, wrong about absolutely everything. They are ignorant, bigoted, cruel, life-hating assholes. Doubt is no day at the beach, but certitude is more like a day at Dachau. That’s what certitude gets you: the Final Solution, Manifest Destiny, the Great Leap Forward, Jonestown. Evils so enormous it’s hard to believe mere human beings were their agents. We Godless infidels may a bunch of fuckups and addicts and flakes, but we’re better people than they are. If our only alternatives are existential confusion or Assholism, I know which side I’m on.

I await the fatwa."

(Mr. Kreider's work can be found at:
[link] )

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/10191175/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/10191175/ Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:06:57 PDT
I've submitted a screenshot sample of the prose with the word count tool open to show that it was, indeed, a minimum of 50K words that were written. The image is a tad fuzzy because it is a
scaled down version of the original graphic file. No electrons were harmed in the process.

]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/9839209/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/9839209/ Thu, 24 Aug 2006 12:56:24 PDT
When i've time i'll post a photo of the finished La Llorona embroidery. ]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/9745641/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/9745641/ Wed, 16 Aug 2006 08:19:09 PDT
I've tried writing upbeat, happy-happy-joy-joy stuff in the past, but unless i stick a raspberry in it somewhere it never seems to come out right. So maybe Plato is right, and it's just a fact of life that folks are better at certain genres of art than others. And it's not as if i don't keep trying to expand my horizons and work with other topics. Lately there's been a bit of a buzz among the folks of Reclaiming as they try, as a collective group, to articulate just what it is that Reclaiming is all about, what it could be about, what all it should be about, and what sort of future, if any, it has as a "tradition". Personally i think alot of the qubbling would cease if the folks involved considered that the universe is more appropriately described in terms of verbs than nouns, but then since i'm not in the thick of it all i'm sure i'm missing much of the debate and probably only have the vaguest ideas as to what is going on. But i've been watching from the outskirts, and yesterday a rondelet about it gelled on my neurons and it goes like this:

Identity
What so many are in search of
Identity
As means to find serenity
And give one's doubts a good hard shove
While finding ways to one's true love
Identity

Now, doesn't that make you wish i'd stick to themes founded on angst? ]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/4901353/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/4901353/ Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:08:13 PST ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/4846774/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/4846774/ Fri, 18 Mar 2005 14:45:29 PST
I've a couple of flash projects i've been working on that, at the moment,
seem so utterly pointless and don't even hold my attention anymore as an
exercise of flash techniques. And yet, i feel like i should make
*something*.

Mostly as a technical exercise i've been writing senryu...in German.
The experience has been alot like trying to fit an elephant into a suitcase,
but i've found that if i stick to rather small elephants that it's possible.
And sometimes i need to get a slightly bigger suitcase (i.e., expand it
into a tanka). ]]> ~emortalcoil http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/3684531/ http://emortalcoil.deviantart.com/journal/3684531/ Wed, 27 Oct 2004 07:09:19 PDT is cyberpixels.com. They offer hosting on a linux server which i like. They
have rates that are better than alot of the hosting companies out there, which
i like. But it looks like you get what you pay for. Or, to be more precise,
i'm paying for what i'm *not* getting, and i don't like that at all.

For two years in a row now, those twits have let my DNS entry expire even
though they got paid on time for their service. This effectively knocks my site
off the internet until they get off their butts and reregister the site, and then
of course it takes some time for the update to propagate throught the net.

The reason this entry has the title, "meditation on a webpage" is because their
index page has this nifty, limited offer: for a hefty wad of cash they promise
to host your site forever. Just think, for the cost of about three years of
service, paid upfront, they offer to host you for as long as they're in business.

Nice deal, yeah? Well, the last time a company made a similar sales pitch to
me i was naive enough to buy it. In that particular case it was a company
that sold pager service. The deal was really sweet; four years of service for
a really low price. Well, the company went bankrupt about four *months*
later, making the $ to time ratio higher than that of any pager company i've
ever checked. It seems that companies like to make those type of offers
when they're having cashflow problems. I couldn't say for certain if that's
what's behind the offer at cyberpixel, but i'd hazard to guess that if they'd
actually give customers the service they pay for at the regular rates, they
wouldn't have to make deals that promise lifetime service for a wad of cash
upfront.

I also notice that that limited offer notice has been sitting on their homepage
for what seems like a very long time. ]]> ~emortalcoil