| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 11:21 am: | |
I can't help it. I am mesmerised by simulations. Mainly just by the simulation of objects, landscapes, movement. Visual effects like sunbursts or cloud or mist or water. It affects me like an idiot. I can spend hours tinkering with a flight sim; not necessarily playing the game but just sight-seeing. It fascinates me. It's like seeing women in their underwear or something. It is somewhat addictive. So I stroll around the harbour, looking at a container freighter and the 'water' around it. Maybe I fire my gun at a stack of oil drums just to see the explosion; to feel I have done something; been there. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 11:24 am: | |
Hey, that's interesting. --- io I put this on a sub-heading by mistake. Which is what it is. Not directly connected with the real world.
Can it be shifted out into the mainstream?
How embarassing.
And we only have four days left to save the world. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 11:27 am: | |
*click*
Here you are. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 11:31 am: | |
I used to enjoy 3D unfilled vectors in games like Mercenary. You'd wander around testing the limits of the geometry, and there's no-one there and nothing going on. Best sort of game: fuck-all happening and no point to it. I think that's why I went off computer games, they got too busy and interesting. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 2:05 pm: | |
Thanks io.
There is a sense in which it is all like this. I only know Juliet Lewis from films but she inhabits a part of my verbal aparatus somehow; I like the way she says "How embarassing!" and find myself trying to imitate it. How embarassing!
I like the way Dustin Hoffman asks whatsisname in Midnight Cowboy "Do you want some Cwowffee?" So that I live in my own sort virtual space verbally - to some degree. Same with music. Its becoming increasingly virtual. David Byrne recently pointed this out with MP3s; they can be understood as rendering 'virtual' versions of songs. (And of course there is also the fact that real songs are now being released on My Space. (Real?)) I find myself fascinated by this thinned out reality. Like the cream on a bottle of milk. Have it with strawberries. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 2:16 pm: | |
Secondary cream. It's the cream inverted. It's the stuff that's thinner than ordinary reality, not thicker, that counts. It's the bottle of milk upside down. Yes, I'm standing on my head.
The inside is outside, the outside is inside.
I can do a kind of tour of the world while sitting in my chair and waving a magic wand. Abaracadabara. (ie the joystick: guiding the plane to a good landing.) |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 2:36 pm: | |
I had The Godfather game on my PC at Christmas, which was fantastic because my graphics card couldn't quite run it. So all the people were filled out and real, but the scenery was all white shapes of buildings, etc, with some basic 3d effects going. The birds were the best - little squares in the sky, that would suddenly land and turn into birds, or take off and turn back in flocking white squares... |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 3:09 pm: | |
>>The birds were the best - little squares in the sky, that would suddenly land and turn into birds, or take off and turn back in flocking white squares...
They should do that sort of thing on purpose. Filled vectors just try too hard.
Shit! we're almost sounding like a normal internet forum here! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 06, 2007 - 3:36 pm: | |
io you've pigeon-holed us!
We are square pigeons on pigeon squares.
I feel like pink triangles this afternoon.
But since I am a fan of the tall tale here is what happened. Abnormality henceforth resumes.
Flight simmers talk of the immersion factor.
I have experienced this myself. Sims work visually but they also work conceptually. Which is important if they are to retain one's interest. There is a sense in which the start-up procedures put you in the cockpit. Or the skills needed to manoeuvre the plane. One's consciousness enters into the continuity of the simulation. 'Realtime' passes and the sun moves across the sky; the weather changes. That absorbtion can be refreshing. I sometimes find myself looking at real, actual clouds and horizons with a peculiar nostalgia, born of the memory of the non-event of the simulation: of that fictional experience. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 12, 2007 - 8:53 am: | |
Decision making in the real world.
I fly around in a virtual environment in a Superhornet and guilt pricks my conscience. There is a real one in a photo: Bush is going to use it to declare war on Iran. As with Iraq, for entirely spurious reasons. For the sake of lies.
Do I live on another planet? How is it that George Bush lives on another planet and yet is able to influence this one to such a degree as to bring the day of its destruction nearer by a significant margin?
Maybe this merely teaches us an unwonted lesson; that the only really decisive thing in human affairs is death - and its counterpart in politics and society: war. We are only in a state of 'world peace' (that is to say) because it is a virtual peace: because of the imagination of the destruction that would happen in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Meanwhile, within this 'virtual peace' we have a cold war or better than that we have hot wars with countries that it is politically convenient to destroy. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - 3:14 pm: | |
We 'contact' the world through virtual intermediaries. Increasingly. We have been absorbed by a kind of media reality. Phones! To what degree does one experience normal social interaction with others? One chats. But my colleagues spend most of their time staring at monitors. As do I. That is neither bad nor good; merely actual. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 14, 2007 - 11:34 am: | |
It's like blotting paper. Where is the original document? What did it say? The sharp outlines of those original, cardinal words that the document contained as sacred text have left behind only vague Rorschach forms. Could be a donkey eating grass or a mountain or something. Words? No. But anyway, who can now tell? The sentence – if that was what it was – once sharply incised has become a kind of smear: at best a sort of menstrual trace; left on the bedclothes; pink against the squared off idea of the missing form that the paper served as the desktop for. The official who demanded it has taken it long since; in a fierce formal gesture; a sudden draft and a slamming of doors; those will never be opened again. Not the originals. Nothing remains. Or but perhaps a blueprint. Vaguely. All the clouds have gone away. Sunshine. An endless internal space. In anycase. Genuine Windows Vista running on a pristine Intel genuine machine. Genuine; original; unique; unlike any other; no one else is like this. Blotting paper. Blot me. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 10:25 am: | |
Something is taking place.
But who knows what it is?
It could be coffee; it could be tea.
It could be neither.
Meanwhile the street continues to be outside
while I inside continue my learning to be sensible. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, February 22, 2007 - 1:49 pm: | |
This I suppose is a continuation of the A World in a Drop of Water thread on the Talkback site but it connects with game-playing too. With 'little worlds'. That site is also down presently; so in the meantime this struck me, while I was re-watching Nostalgia yesterday. The way that in each sequence Tarkovsky constructs small worlds of infinity; each scene dovetailing to become an articulate chain, to become a unity subsidiary to the larger filmic narrative’s unity. Another way of expressing this would be to say that Tarkovsky finds a way of finding time in the film. For example he makes Gorchakov’s and Eugenia’s wait in the hotel lobby for the concierge to let them into their rooms seem unending. But not by emphasising that wait but by letting them think about other things. They discuss poetry in translation. He lights a cigarette. The camera looks straight down to the end of the lobby, to where the internal hotel stairs begin. They discuss music. The wait ceases to be a wait; the presence of Gorchakov and Eugenia where they are becomes an end in itself. They are simply present and alive, looking at life. The moment becomes internal to itself.
It’s that lack of instrumentality that lifts the moment above the mundane. To compare: when Salinger in A Perfect Day for Bannanafish has the woman at the beginning answer the phone, he takes at least a page over describing it. The moment’s instrumentality is lost. She doesn’t answer the phone. The phone rings and she has all the time in the world to answer it. But she doesn’t answer it. She dries her nails. She lights a cigarette – and so forth. We are put into a moment; or into a world …
It becomes living, has a sense of actuality, because it contains more than a mere instrumentality.
In this connection, look at the way Tarkovsky slyly creates worlds in miniature in many of his films. Gorchakov’s first visit to Domenico finds him looking at a mysterious, wholly unexplained world in miniature, a whole planet, or landscape inside Domenico’s house, that the camera pans over – eventually rising up to what the viewer is forced to assume are actual hills, the one’s he has just seen visible outside. A world is contained in what is 'not one'. In 'a mere scene in passing'. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 - 11:13 am: | |
>>>Whilst some hobbies strike many people as trivial or boring, hobbyists have found something compelling and entertaining about them (see geek). (From Wikipedia.)
When does a hobby become a sport? When it's full time? Is reading just a hobby for most of us?
Up there with the garden shed: geeks out to grass.
A sport and a pastime. A subsidiary passion.
I am reading Tim Krabbe's The Rider, about a cycle race over 137 kilometres. He looks with pity at non-riders; people who cannot share his experience. He puts you in the riding seat so to speak. Like another book, Salter's The Hunters does with flying; or MJHs Climbers with climbing. Books about sport. There is an affinity with flying simulations too: a Superhornet sim represents a kind of sport. There is something 'geeky' about it until you realise the degree of its proximity to the real thing.
Real life designers, flyers, play these simulations too and in fact are sometimes the principal enthusiasts.
But here we come to the underlying thought. As with reading science fiction or comics or fantasy, why one feels a need to justify what one is doing, why it is worrying to be outside inside. Out in that sunlight! It is like reading. Nothing actually happens with it. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 - 11:18 am: | |
The camera pans up. I am lost in my own little world. I find myself master of this little infinity. Like the little house in The Sacrifice. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Monday, February 26, 2007 - 11:23 am: | |
>>When does a hobby become a sport? When it's full time? Is reading just a hobby for most of us?
A hobby, it would seem, is something that you can't make a living out of. Work is the real thing and a hobby is something to keep you off the street. It's to do with an uneasy relationship to leisure.
The word tends to be used to refer to, for example my music, by people who think I should concentrate on a *real* career. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 1:19 pm: | |
Is it just me or is there a cosmic significance in the fact that if you turn Iraq upside down you almost get Blair? Today's topic is the human personality. Or the human personality as filtered by flight simulators. It is almost the same thing. Has anyone ever been struck by the fact that flight simulators have personalities? Indeed, such that just perceptible, faintly visible, is the beginnings of a machine consciousness. You will, eventually, get flight simulator intelligences with human rights, property portfolios and even marriages and children. Has anyone ever thought of that? What would the offspring of, say, Pacific Fighters and Jane's Superhornet look like? And why not throw in a movie? Casablanca. That has a plane in it. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 28, 2007 - 2:09 pm: | |
Hmm, leisure isn't the word. I think the whole 'live in the real world' thing is very defensive; it's to do with fear. People who've sacrificed their own interests / obsessions in order to create (financial) security are very put out when you don't do the same and - look! - the sky doesn't fall in! I think it translates as - 'be scared of the same things I am, so that your behaviour justifies rather than challenges sacrifices I've made'. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 10:42 am: | |
There is a distinction between hobbyist and amateur. Salinger dedicates his Raise High the Roof Beams to the 'amateur reader'. "If there is an amateur reader left in the world ..." |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 11:05 am: | |
Isn't that the old 'gentleman' and 'players' thing, stripped off its class implications? Reminds me of the academic / non-academic debate also. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 11:25 am: | |
I like the word "professional" when it's applied to chewing gum, as in Orbit Professional.
"I'm here to chew gum and kick ass, and I'm all out of gum." |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 12:56 pm: | |
Orbit Professional? How on earth does that work? Does it bill you by the hour for chewing it or something? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 1:28 pm: | |
You have to ask yourself the question: am I a masiticator or have I the refinement to the point where I can say the genteman chews?
Gentlemen chew, players masticate. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, March 01, 2007 - 1:48 pm: | |
I rather got the impression that it's just not for weekend gum chewers. Non-members of the Institute of Chartered Gum Chewers need not apply. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 9:57 am: | |
I'm thinking that professional gum chewers chew gum even when they don't want to. Till their gums bleed. Only the professionals get to be in the gum peleton so to speak.
An idea is a blade of grass. Pretty soon it's a whole prarie. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 10:11 am: | |
As Peter Sellers observed in the radio trailers to The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu: "many men smoke but Fu Manchu!"
Now why do I remember that? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 10:56 am: | |
But enough of eating the air - empty calories in the oakey stomach so to speak - for a British Beef Eater left achey, what suits me to a T is to drink in the teeth of the mock dullness that the seeming is not actual - how far can one take this? - being actual so that (to give the question its twin eyes) the virtual is not a form of gum chewing! |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 11:03 am: | |
Hmm, but you're still chewing SOMETHING... tho' come to think of it with the virtual you're still engagin g with SOMETHING.
Interesting that both look like they should be something gerundial, as words. If you're chewing you can chew - if you're something, how do you someth? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 11:10 am: | |
A masticator is too machine-like; if you are one with your bicycle then neither exist. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 11:41 am: | |
If I am one with my bicycle then icicle. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 1:09 pm: | |
Is the illusion of reality a kind of god?
(If a god is to be defined as a beyond-human power.)
Since it is only of what resembles us that we say that it is or that it can be human. For if I say that something is a god then I mean that it has powers that I don't and can't understand that so to say coalesce: appear to become human in the import of that incomprehension. Therefore, in something being only illusion, it is a form of god too. For neither can that be comprehended.
That's the sort of mood I am in today, I afraid.
There are gods everywhere. Forgotten. Only of what can't be called a god is it sensible to call it a god. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 2:05 pm: | |
Hmm - isn't it a Christian mystic stance that God is only that which cannot be known? For the divine to be known by the fallen is a failure of its unfallen status. So by definition we can only ever engage with God through illusion, tho' I'm not quite sure that that's the same thing as you're saying.
More news on the icicle btb - apparently it is very well boiled. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 2:25 pm: | |
Hmm, dunno. If we're looking at someone like Eckhart, he envisions a divine spark comparable with the "atman" of Upanishadic Hinduism. It's precisely through this faculty that the mystic might know the divine.
Diamonds in shit and all that. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 3:03 pm: | |
Not quite sure what I'm thinking of - just dug up th e last stanza of 'Dark Night of the Soul':
8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.
I abandoned and forgot myself - ie the self that knows God cannot be the self that knows the world. So by rising to know God the divine spark abandons the human? |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 3:53 pm: | |
>>So by rising to know God the divine spark abandons the human?
Oof! Now that opens a can of worms, no? I'd imagine that the divine spark is of a like substance to that of the Godhead. Not sure exactly what Eckhart's take on this would be, but the equivalent Hindu position would be that this spark is more fundamental to the self that the egoic self. Which in the eyes of the mystic is exactly the opposite to illusion. The passing realm of matter, Maya, is illusion.
Depends where we position the self. In the Christian version I don't think it'd be in the ego, and we're probably beyond the superego position of devotional religion. But yes, almost certainly beyond the meat.
The mystic must learn to beat the meat! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 4:02 pm: | |
>>Which in the eyes of the mystic is exactly the opposite to illusion.
To clarify: "This divine spark, from the mystic's perspective, is the polar opposite to illusion." |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 4:09 pm: | |
Just been distracted from all this by a couple kissing passionately in the well-lit flat opposite my office. She still has her spectacles on, though, so you can draw your own conclusions.
Sorry - where were we ..? |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 4:18 pm: | |
It's all illusion, Martin.
Beat the meat! You know you can beat it! |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 4:26 pm: | |
Not *quite* the spiritual signpost I was seeking, actually ...
Oh, well: down to Sainsbury's more honey and locusts, then back to the wilderness. The answer must be out there somewhere, near Corby. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Friday, March 02, 2007 - 4:32 pm: | |
>>near Corby.
Press those trousers! You know you can press them!
A good day's work everyone! We've gone from Orbit Professional to the Corby Trouser Press via the spirituality of Meister Eckhart and Peter Sellers. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 9:12 am: | |
Trousers with ironed creases in them mark the advent of the industrial: the machined edge, the implication of polish. One could never imagine a pair of ironed Shakespeare shorts. Eloquence indeed. Fashion is a kind of sense. Mystics don't wear creases. Tintin - never sported ironed trousers ... We've done shoes (in films), trousers, so I suppose next its pants or handkerchiefs - those last invented by King Richard II, quite sensibly.
But why do teenagers nowadays often wear their jeans with the belt located below the crotchline? Faces hidden by hoods, trousers round their ankles. What does it say? |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 9:40 am: | |
Da bling iz looz, bruv - jenarwharahmean?
http://www.theblingking.co.uk/ |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 10:21 am: | |
It takes a certain amount of daring to wear jeans so that the waistline is actually below the crotchline so your expensive boxers are visible for all to see - it is also distinctively male - black in origin and going with a hood it suggests abandonment. To me. Social desolation. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 10:22 am: | |
>> why do teenagers nowadays often wear their jeans with the belt located below the crotchline?
Yo! I can help you with that. In American penitentiaries, inmates aren't permitted belts, so their trousers hang down. Gangster chic has taken that look and exaggerated it - hence the whole dengling trouser thing.
Respeck! |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 10:36 am: | |
Someone who walks around in a state of imminent self-exposure must be in a state of hightened self-consciousness - a state of self-induced excitement - and therefore is guaranteed to be in a little world of their own. They put themselves at the centre of everyone's attention. Like balancing a stick on the end of your nose: will it fall off? It is also somewhat nappy-like. |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Monday, March 05, 2007 - 12:09 pm: | |
Hmm. Well, gangsta rap has always struck me as an incredibly commercialised form of music, one that comes with a whole consumer lifestyle to match. And the ideal consumer is someone who is infantilised; who buys on a whim, with no forward planning or thought for the future. More generally, your gangsta rapper personality seems to be a very infantilised world view - reminds me a bit of comments about The Hulk as being the raging toddler in all of us. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, August 22, 2007 - 9:19 am: | |
http://www.final-form.com/body.htm
"So, who's going to be Phlebas?"
Unbelievable ... |
al
Username: al
Registered: 11-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, August 30, 2007 - 3:21 pm: | |
*creates character*
*rolls up bottom of trouser legs*
Right, whose turn next? |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Monday, September 03, 2007 - 8:53 am: | |
*Parts hair behind*
*Eats peach*
Christ - we're in the wrong poem!
I don't mind being the third one walking, etc. - but I draw the line at "the young man carbuncular," thank you very much. |