"To me they were human beings"
Film
Schindlers List fckd me up. There are moments in time when I’ve consumed some media or the other: magazine articles, movies, novels. There are things that moved me, surprised me. Schindlers List was not so much about the Holocaust, which in and of itself truly struck me as a great atrocity. And I can’t (nor do I need to) separate the holocaust from the film; the thing that has stayed with me forever was the notion of failure over triumph in the appraisal of ones legacy.
“I could have done more.”
Julie
My ruminations continue on Julie Powell.
I think part of the connection with her death is that she and I are alumni of this moment in the early days of the internet.
Contributing to the internet in the early days was technical, you had to put effort in. It would take some time before turnkey hosting arrived. Those early hosts like Live Journal and Blogger lowered the technical aspects which freed people to express themselves without knowing code or how to manage files structures. This democratization of writing created the modern blog era as we know it for the common person who wanted to express themselves but had little technical experience.
Personal writing online was and still is a way to share yourself with others. It is absolutely journal exhibitionism, but this is a different way of sharing your life with yourself, friends, family, and the public. That said the commercial internet has always been about exploiting the efforts of its contributors (usually through advertisement), for the gain of a corporation. For us the creators that is a *faustian deal. Our participation in a hosted solution accommodates skill limitations, usually appears to have little costs, but in reality robs us of control, legacy, and places us at the whims of corporations that we unwittingly work for.
Julie was never polished. She was a person who had settled into life, wasn’t happy, felt herself in a rut and did something about it. She started to write. She started to cook. And she merged these two efforts into enough energy to shift her paradigm. Maybe most importantly Julie Powell stayed human and flawed. She didn’t succumb to the machine in quite the way that others usually do once there is any amount of success.
Faustian deal
Faustian bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches. The term refers to the legend of Faust (or Faustus, or Doctor Faustus), a character in German folklore and literature, who agrees to surrender his soul to an evil spirit (in some treatments, Mephistopheles, or Mephisto, a representative of Satan) after a certain period of time in exchange for otherwise unattainable knowledge and magical powers that give him access to all the world’s pleasures. A Faustian bargain is made with a power that the bargainer recognizes as evil or amoral. Faustian bargains are by their nature tragic or self-defeating for the person who makes them, because what is surrendered is ultimately far more valuable than what is obtained, whether or not the bargainer appreciates that fact. source: Britannica
Technology
I’m filling my house up with Mac-shit. I have and always have had this love hate with Apple. As a fat black kid from the southside of Chicago the only computers I saw before we moved to Georgia were the ones that government workers had, and the occasional homebrew kinda computer, like the Tandy TRS-80 and other fair, which now I understand were portables meant for text files and writing code on the go. Once we got to Georgia my highschool had some Apple IIe computers. More importantly I could use them!
To stick with the macs a moment longer. I’ve gotten to this point where i’d rather use Linux machines which are rock hard stable and third place (in a four position race), on ease of adding features. Like Apple hardware they just work and building a OS that functions nearly flawlessly is their focus. Troubleshooting problems when they do occur is immediately hard. Finding and adding software also not for the feint of heart. All that said, the integration of the features across MacOS, iOS, and iPadOs is stunningly great. You can look at most of it as gimmickery. I think i’ll fall deeper into mac though and it will be because of pictures and the ability to work on one machine and the other machine being able to do things like absorb your copy and paste.
Life
No drinking till Thanksgiving.
This is not a “no november” thing.
I love Thanksgiving, I think it is my favorite holiday. Food, thanks. No gifts and schlepping around family, just food, thanks.
I want a few bottles of bordeaux, maybe a decadent scotch of some sort and I want to truly enjoy them. I want for them to be a maximum experience, not just “expensive flavors” for the holiday with no kick.
