RIP Aaron Swartz

At 14 Aaron Swartz co-authored the RSS 1.0 spec. Before 20 he had co-founded Reddit and managed to get himself released from Conde Nast publishing house after the sale. Shortly after he became politically active.
His first foray was a mass downloading of PACER documents from a public library with trial access. Then he published everything on another server freeing public domain work from a paywall. Aaron believed that publicly held works should be available freely. His early work in coding brought the committment of open into his worldview and his first taste of activism would not be stopped. The FBI opened a case against him and closed it two months later pissed off. Aaron’s work shut down the free access of libraries to PACER but created a better place for those documents to be found.
Next he broke into a utility closet at MIT and used a script to mass download academic articles from JSTOR. Aaron was arrested on MIT campus for this. The FBI was involved again. Official charges included XXX. JSTOR then declined to persue civil litigation against him. The FBI continued to press charges anyway. All of the work that Aaron downloaded was in the public domain and he had a license, through his status at Harvard, to access that content.
In early 2013 the Justice Department dropped its case against him. The formal statement apologized for the process that had been used against him. Pressure had been applied from the White House after some creative lobbying efforts to the cabinet directly. Shortly after Aaron went on to take Demand Progress into its finest chapter spending the next five years drafting legislation and fighting corporate cronyism. The dozens of pieces of legislation that redefined terrorist and what actions could not ken against people branded as such, restructured campaign finance, gutted lobbying groups, and destroyed any paywall entrances to government documents stand today as basic rights most people take for granted. Digital rights became a term that people across the nation understood and got behind.
His committment to openness continued and his activism grew. Through donations he funded a new kind of Internet Archive, not just a compendium of uploads and the Wayback machine but becoming an active place for discussion and material together. Through his contacts he became a technology consultant to the Governor of California. However this appointment was not meant to last. With the access he gained he saw firsthand the corruption that was rampant in higher levels of government. He released internal documents that showed the hands of almost every major corporation in America’s links to political silencing, mass murders abroad, and worse the complicity with which politicians would meet their demands. Suggestions for how to best stay off the books about genocide abroad and the full plans for a nuclear assault of Iran were published.
World politics changed. Aaron’s work and his committment to showing just what was happening brought a new reign of reforms in the Middle East. Activists there took to the streets decrying their governments actions and the way that they had been taken for fools by those in power. The Arab Spring now is remembered as a precursor to the later revolutionaries. Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Greece, Spain, and dozens of others around the Mediterranean took the charge and revealed internal problems that resulted in not just a change of regime but socially focused democracies. All of their new constitutions hold transparency in government as a necessity.
At 35 Aaron published “Open” which was met with critical success and finally catapaulted the Creative Commons licenses onto the best sellers list. And made their way into classrooms. That year he was offered a position at MIT on technology and policy a that fall he taught the first class in coding and law. Aaron’s curriculum was published on the web and thousands of people took the class alongside the lecture of 200. This was the first class to ever break a million participants. Classroom discussion was catalogued and later published as an addendum to “Open”.
Aaron’s work changed the world.
Actually it didn’t. On January 11, 2013 Aaron Swartz committed suicide. He was scheduled for court hearings that April. The Department of Justice wanted a sentence of at least 50 years and never dropped their charges. No one from the Obama administration did anything to help him. Aaron died at 26 in New York City.

My comments on Our Chick-fil-A economy

I really think this strikes to the heart of our problems. Facts and evidence are no longer viable speaking points in modern politics in this country. Instead we have doctrines and isms running political discourse as a means of hammering on one another instead of finding a place where we can all agree we’re happier than we were before it came along. Or at least most of us. Pointing out that 3 generations of American policy have done nothing but make the issues worse should be enough to make us all consider why; instead it is used as a platform of attack that measures need to continue. I want a government that uses evidence not faith. http://pulse.me/s/bQzBx

Facebook

I deactivated my Facebook account. I couldn’t really stand to listen to the drive anymore especially in a forum where conversation seems to be willfully suppressed by the users and staff. I was tired of dealing with extremist, uncompromising Right politics and I cannot escape that living in this area. But I can choose to not have that fight anymore. I believe in something different than the norm and I’m tired of getting myself passed off because of it.

One of the events leading to my ultimate move was an old friend via church spouting how socialism was sinful, against God, and basically jusfication for hell. I just don’t want ideas like that. I can’t rationally deal with those kinds of people. They will cite whatever they deem scripture and have therefore proved my sinful state of believing the best in people instead of the worst. From a religion that teaches to rise above the natural man they sure like to revel in the qualities they themselves consider fallen.

This, I admit, may have had more to do with the people I had in my network than the platform itself. Unfortunately Facebook is so institutionalized among people my age that certain social relationships require that you be friends on the blue box network. So instead I’ve just left the network. I’m definitely not as angry, but I’m still just as alone.

Read In the Lake of the Woods

I finished reading “In the Lake of the Woods” by Tim O’Brien today. Before I get into anything in the book though I have to say that O’Brien’s book “The Things They Carried” brought something to me that I can never thank him enough for. O’Brien’s themes are often dense and impossible to truly extricate from one another as they flow freely like life does. Every word applies twice or more, in different ways, moving toward the goal of how real things are supposed to feel. In TTTC the idea of truth and story truth was when I first felt someone explain why fiction was important to me and why it mattered to keep telling it.

In the Lake of the Woods reminds me of Joyce Carol Oates’ novella Black Water; both deal with politicians, lies, cover-ups, and throughout uncertainty. Black Water’s uncertainty, though, is different than that found In the Lake of the Woods. O’Brien titles his chapters “Hypothesis” and continually reassesses the situation with different scant facts of the case drawn in different lights leading to many conclusions about possibility. Black Water however must end with Kelly drowning in the car as happened at Chappaquiddick, it’s the how and the when and the why that remain uncertain until the end. O’Brien never answers the questions leaving possibilities open, motivations unclear.

Instead of a clear ending we are left with a portrait of a man. One who was a part of the hideous slayings at My Lai during the Vietnam War. Carefully we are revealed the man through the plot moving through the time period in the novel, the evidence against the man, quotes from those around him, the hypotheses as to the fate of Kathy and moments from Kathy and John’s past. The portrait is unsettling and the question of whether he is a monster or simply a human is left open in the pages. But I cannot see him as the monster I wish I could. He murdered a fellow combatant and an innocent civilian and possibly his wife but he still is a man. The complexity of situation, the understanding of how people are formed and make decisions and the things we allow ourselves to go through draw that clearly, O’Brien humanizes the people who commit the worst acts possible but never lauds them, never apologizes for them, never makes the horror go away. This is the genius of O’Brien: painting people that are contradictory and damaged, allowing the unspeakable acts to be splayed like rent human beings leaving blood, bone, and brain on the page and showing us all that the atrocities came from people. Not machines, not those without conscience, not those without lives or wives or aspirations or dreams. The most terrible acts in humanity happened with men that fail like everyone else. This does not excuse them or the war or the bodies but it becomes apparent what we might be capable of. What happens when we let ourselves glide instead of direct. What the mind of otherwise good people is capable of when placed in a carnival of death where the stakes are to make it to your fox hole that night and the price is your life. O’Brien then pulls that experience, how it alters a person and shows the attempts at coping. The possibility of suicide. The trial. The denial. The magician in Sorcerer who waved his hands and hid it away until the inevitable reappearance else it isn’t a magic trick. The proclivity for self deception. The drink and smoke that tries the same.

Most gripping are the footnotes that come from an obvious outside voice, though this is all fiction it feels like an interjection of the storyteller. I hesitate to say it is O’Brien speaking directly as TTTC’s main character is Tim O’Brien and to read it as first person fact is obviously not the point. This muddy territory is where O’Brien shines speaking in ways that can only be done in fiction yet with a power and clarity of the man who served, who was there, who lived it. These more rambling passages add so much emotion to the story because it suddenly isn’t just a story of one man whose political self is destroyed by the terrible parts of his past, it’s about an entire generation of people who shipped overseas and died and came home and kept dying. O’Brien tells the stories that we have to know to overcome our penchant for destructive war. This is The Gulf, this is Afghanistan, this is all war. Terrible acts committed by living breathing humans. By looking at the dark maybe somehow we can overcome it. Not the porny look into depraved eyes and the lust of the despicable but the look through fiction that provides emotional connection, letting the fact that it is not true fall away because it doesn’t matter if it affects you. Letting the affect of looking at the darkness reflected in our own eyes change our course.

Why I’m scared to understand the world differently

I have a problem. It’s this idea that I have and it basically goes like this: If everyone understood an issue perfectly we would all arrive at the same conclusion. This feels like a hallmark of my socialist leanings and belief that people do good things for other people. This, to me, is at the heart of unions and communist living experiments. It’s something that makes Marxism make sense to me: the biggest problem is everyone not understanding the issues, not being educated, not being willing to see the issue objectively.
It’s not that everyone will come to exactly the same conclusion per se. Everyone will have diferent ideas to solve the problems. It’s more that everyone will be striving for the same goals. Recently I read about the private citizen who went into space. He talked about how that step outside of our atmosphere was this eye opening experience, weather was something observed naturally and understood organically when viewed from that distance. The world was smaller when you orbitted it, it was somewhere you lived instead of this infinite expanse we normally imagine. I feel like these statements validate my ideology. If everything could be seen like that, if there was a way to pull up past the stratosphere of human interaction and really examine it people would come out different, changed, and with a greater appreciation for humanity. Votes would change, people would be more compassionate, things would be done for the good of all people. Marx believed that at some point the masses who had been exploited for almost the entirety of human history would rise up. I feel like a moment of clarity like this would change it.
Take gun control for instance. I feel like if there was some way of objectively portraying the way guns have affected the lives of people that everyone would end up at the same conclusion. I personally believe that conclusion is that we don’t need guns. I’m not saying that guns weren’t invented for a reason but that things have shifted. It’s like watching a hurricane form over the Atlantic; Innocuous and necessary weather patterns happen across Africa then move off of that origin building strength over the ocean and becoming something fierce and powerful. If this is something we created then it would be something we could stop. Something that would eliminate the deaths of countless innocent people. But this really does require everyone to believe in. The cartels, terrorists, governments, gangs, and everyone in between. Everyone has to agree that they can’t exist.
We’re quickly entering a world of instant fabrication with 3D printing fast becoming a reality. If the ability to control p2p and darknets is any indicator everything in the world will be printable by any one, possibly within our own lifetime. This isn’t a post about the technology, but about my beliefs. My beliefs mandate that this sort of innovation come and that we deal with the consequences. Maybe disruptive technologies can be a moment where people take a step back and realize more about our social interactions, but I’m doubtful. The Internet has been the most disruptive technology to date and completely changed how people can communicate and share yet a simple look at the docket of any modern government shows that this is something to be controlled instead of fostered. It’s shut down completely by regimes when protests break out.
My point is that I might be wrong about all of this. That makes a big problem for me. What if everyone doesn’t come to the same conclusions. What if hedonists aren’t people who aren’t willing to see the world objectively: they just don’t come to the same conclusions I do about what’s the best course of action for the world. What if Ayn Rand Objectivists just don’t give a shit that I’ve come to grand conclusions about what could be if we regulated a market? Most troubling to me is what if college educated individuals who believe in young earth theory or are Tea Party advocates actually aren’t having an issue seeing the world through a different lense, instead they see it and just come to a different conclusion of where we should be going?
I don’t have an answer to this and it feels like my entire means of understanding the world falls apart if objectivity fails to bring people closer together. I don’t know if objectivity of the world of human interactions is possible, and it may well not be, but I have this feeling that if it can exist that people would come together to take steps in the same direction as a race. Not everyone wants to write code. Or philosophize. Or write. Or build 3D printers. But what if people can truly see the world objectively and don’t want to come together to build something better? Marx falls apart and I fall apart. I hope I’m not wrong because I’m scared of what the world is really like if I am.

Why your argument is wrong

This comment, and those like it, always rub me the wrong way because it assumes a few things that aren’t necessarily true.

First, the “Why aren’t you doing it if it’s so easy” fallacy. Let’s be real here, it is much easier to point out issues than it is to create things. I’ll go with you there, but just because someone can point out things does not necessarily mean that they would even want to be churning out pop songs. This fallacious argument assumes that because someone enjoys listening to music they want to create music as a career! Well that feels like a pretty slippery slope to be riding. As someone who made some music I realized quickly it’s something I want to be doing as a hobby for the rest of my life (possibly even making some money at) but not something that I want to be spending every waking moment perfecting. Music is fun, I’m just not in it to make money (most people who talk about music online also aren’t trying to make money by churning pop songs out).

Second, still in the same vein, is the idea that making money on music simply comes from writing songs. “Making hit songs” seems to enjoin coding and music making. As much as music can be broken down into some somewhat basic components (that will get more and more complex as understanding increases) via theory the idea that sitting pen to paper or midiboard to workstation is how you “make” music is absolutley preposterous. The fact that this thinking has believers scares me. Some people actually can make a living simply writing, but they need someone to perform for them which means revenue splitting. Most pop acts take this. Popular music is churned out by the bucketload by a staff of writers who never perform. These people are, ostensibly, codemonkeys. This is not how the majority of music in the world is made. This is, however, the majority of major label music is made. The fallacious idea that this is what all people want to do to “make” music is preposterous. If you don’t believe me go ask a local band how they make music, I’m fairly confident that they’ll let you sit in at a rehearsal so you can see how it’s made. Another simple means would be to attend anything blues.

Third, the argument “there is a scarcity of talent and dedication” in 4 billion people. Right. In the United States alone the population is 307,006,550 (according to the census). In 300 MILLION people you’re going to tell me that only ~100 have the drive and talent capable of being a music star? This would break down to 0.00003% of the population. Well that was a fun joke now wasn’t it? There is no way that only that % of people are driven to create something. Why the hell would we even have music taught at school? This is a completely false notion espoused by capitalists all over the place. A really easy place to see this is in Basketball (partly because more specific numbers are available if you want to check my theorizing). The number of high schools with a Varsity basketball team would be just shy of all of them, assuming 10 players per team (probably a low estimate) there would be ~360,000 high schoolers involved in basketball. Of this number of people involved in basketball (and good enough to make a high school team) only 450 players will ever be admitted into the NBA at ANY ONE TIME. Can you see that? Another nice analogy. There are 344 Collegiate Div 1 basketball teams. There are 30 NBA teams. This isn’t exactly a game of “best ofthe best of the best” there’s a high amount of varaiability and unpredictability. Not everyone who works their tail off is going to get there. Stop pretending like the American Dream means that those who work the hardest get the most profits. I’m pretty sure we can all agree taht Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian don’t work the hardest, yet they sit atop mountains of benefits. This is proving to be true with the overbloated financial sector as well.

And, though not a fallacy, point number four deals with the last paragraph. “Well then what’s the ceiling” isn’t really an argument that can be rational in a capitalist society because no matter what number I put out there will be met with hostility. Instead I’d posit there should be a government granted minimum to all those that can prove they have created at least X number of works in an artistic form within a calendar year (though this does make it a bit challenging, I’m sure there could be some regulation to account for time spent touring, hours spent painting, or something else that could possibly work). Then once the minimum requirements are met these people are then considered “artists” and would warrant a 40-60k payment from the government. Yes this is socialist. No this isn’t creeping. If creating art and new forms is important enough for the government to incentivize it (which is what copyright or patent law is supposed to do) then just flat out INCENTIVIZE it. Everyone would make a base pay more than adequate to support their life, and they could still earn ancillary income from the form of music sales, performances, appearances, working as an accountant, teaching some university courses, or reviewing video games.

My big issue is that people need to stop pretending hard work and fair pay have anything to do with one another.Personal story time. I worked fairly hard stocking shelves at Sears. Waking up for a 4AM shift was difficult for me even though I went to bed at a decent hour. I had lots of free time to do what I wanted but that didn’t change the fact that stocking shelves was hard because it was mindless. I moved stuff, vacuums weren’t that heavy, but that didn’t mean they were always the easiest things to deal with either. Taking microwaves down stairs by yourself (those industrial step ladders mind you) isn’t always a piece of cake. I was payed something near minimum wage. I got prety good at my job fairly quickly and wasn’t payed any more for being more efficient. In fact, the better I got the earlier I got sent home which meant the LESS I got payed. When efficiency and hard work equate to marginalization and lower profits, why would anyone pretend that hard work makes people more money?

Sucking a Sorb-Apple: A Queer Reading of D. H. Lawrence

I had to write a paper for my poetry class and had an extremely tough time finding a topic. I spent weeks going over the poems that we had and ended up taking a late grade because I simply couldn’t find anything I could write about. After my criticism class on Queer Theory and rereading D. H. Lawrence’s “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” I finally felt that I had found something worth writing about and I thought I’d publish it here. I tried using google docs embeds in a variety of ways and none of them worked. I’ll link to my published web address for google docs and provide a .pdf download link from my wordpress if anyone wants to save it for any reason.

EDIT: So After seeing that my links are rarely clicked I’ll just post the full text here. PDF still available for downloading at the end of this post.

The text of D. H. Lawrence’s “Medlars and Sorb-Apples” speaks about two fruits that are only palpable when they have over-ripened or started to decay. However the vivid imagery of the eating of these fruits is not wholly about how delicious they are; instead creating an extended metaphor for homoerotic encounters between men. The overt gay themes in the poem will be shown through the sexual imagery connoted with the fruit’s consumption, the mythological references to Dionysus and Orpheus, themes of isolation particularly the separateness of the speaker from the world around him.

The poem begins with “I love you” certainly speaking to the intense emotional feelings that often accompany sexual desire. This phrase is repeated at the beginning of the second stanza and goes on to “suck you out from your skins” (3). These descriptions of eating the decaying fruit are very evocative sexual images that describe the male sexual organs specifically. This is most obvious in line 7 where speaking of the flavor describes it as “com[ing] out of your falling through the stages of decay”. This description is not only of the flavor of the fruit, but more importantly to that of fellatio being performed on males. The falling through decay is easily a reference to the slow loss of erection that occurs after climax. This is even furthered by the next line “Stream within stream” (8) which could be a reference to semen. Although this reading may not stand up easily on a line by line basis, when the overall text can be shown in this light it definitely lends a degree credibility to this interpretation.

However an astute reader could say that we do not know the sex of the speaker, and therefore cannot assert whether this is indeed a heterosexual or homosexual encounter. This is shown through the careful allusions to mythology. In fact overtly sexual imagery in the poem is best defined when Lawrence pens the lines “What is it that reminds us of white gods? / Gods nude” (18, 19). Putting on the eyeglasses provided by the poet then arrives at the conclusion that these sexual innuendos and hinted acts remind us of men, not women and men, but Gods themselves — naked in their glory and “drenched with mystery” (22).  This frames the entirety of the poem within a completely masculine context and therefore leads to a homoerotic reading of the text as a whole. Although the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is referenced and followed in some fashion throughout the rest of the poem Eurydice is left completely unnamed and unacknowledged as if her appearance in the text is merely cursory, something necessary but distasteful. Toward the end of the poem it even goes further with the exclamation “Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell” (52) possibly adding that the final farewell of Orpheus and Eurydice, that turn that prevents Eurydice from returning with him, may be purposeful. This repetition of the farewell lends to the importance of this act. This split between man and female is something left behind, never to again be sought after, instead replaced by desires of same-sex pairing.

Particularly the next stanza speaks of how important these new pairings are to the speaker: “a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing into twain, / A new grasp of further isolation” (29, 30). Here is specific evidence of the homoerotic functions being more important than that which has passed, the brief and forgotten flame with the woman. Instead this trip to hell is not to overcome it but to live in some sort of self-hate for the male-male eroticism into which this poem delves. Particularly the focus on the New by the speaker, and how it is not a fusing, but an “unfusing” to create the two. This view of partners is an extremely fragmented one and furthers the idea that the speaker struggles with his sexuality, especially being repressed in a heteronormative Western culture.

The struggle of being sexually deviant within the culture presses heavily on the speaker and is further refined in the poem by the references to Hell, the Underworld, loneliness and isolation. This is countered, and perhaps complemented, by the Dionysian and drunkenness references that are liberally peppered throughout the poem. Specifically the lines “delicate / Dionysos of the Underworld” (26) push the two images together in juxtaposition. Dionysus obviously being a festive and happy drunken God, depicted in joviality throughout mythology while the Underworld, the realm of Dis, is a polar opposite — a place of emptiness and lifelessness. This sets up a unique juxtaposition to better understand the speaker’s own homoerotic feelings and more generally a look at how this lifestyle creates an acute dichotomy for those living closeted lives. Importantly Dionysus comes first in this allusion, signalling first the happiness and joy in the decision to partake of homoerotic activity and then quickly placed in the perspective of the Underworld, a place that happiness as it exists on Earth is nonexistent. Throwing these mythological and quite universal images together creates a feeling of just how mixed, and tormenting, living in the closet can be, even for heterosexual readers of the poem. The delicate (note the normally female adjective being used to describe a male God!) Dionysus is not simply a wanderer through this Hellish place — he is ofthis place. There is no seeming way to escape the self-hatred that is bred from the internalized homophobia and therefore the joy that the speaker derives from homoerotic activities is also that which causes the most feelings of isolation.

The strings of isolation become more taught as the speaker plows on through his trip in Hell:

Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more intensely alone,

The fibres of the heart parting one after the other

And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, even more vividly embodied

Like a flame blown whiter and whiter

In a deeper and deeper darkness

Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation. (l 32-37)

The juxtaposition of happiness and liveliness with the inky depths of the Hell entombed in this stanza create such a strong binary: the white flame against nothingness, the fibers of the heart tearing and the soul vividly embodied, the repetition of the signifying colors, black versus white, that this refining process is a separating one. This passage speaks not only of the internal struggle between the heteronormative culture and homosexual personal desires but also of the way in which repressive ideologies focus too sharply on binaries and as they refine the lines become ever more distinct where one will fall according to these rules. In fact the inky blackness and the white fire blend one into the other just as the lines between homosocial and homoerotic are not clearly delineated neither are the Western ideology of gay and straight. This focusing on the differences can possibly be a metaphor for these ideologies and how they continue to try to create no middle area and this tears at the speaker in the poem as well. Also the reversal of black and white signifiers in this stanza, white being for the vivaciousness felt in performing homoerotic acts with black being the pressing cultural norms, also shows the completely different viewpoint of the speaker from that which is around him. Instead of seeing what he is as a deeply wrong or evil thing it brings him salvation, one could argue even a purity—the cultural norms which surround him are the vile and destitute hangers-on that belong down in the depths of hell.

The speaker continues down his isolating journey possibly even passing beyond the ability to have partners and retain a means of interacting with the world: “Each soul departing with its own isolation, / Strangest of all strange companions, / And best.” (43-45). The speaker, in his hellish journey through life experience, seems to have come to a conclusion that this isolation is his best means of coping with whom he is. That the best companion that he has on this journey is himself, that no other partner could understand or help lift his burdens. Even more dark is that he views himself as his most strange companion in his travels. That he, above all, is the freak, the unnatural in life. The effects of a homophobic culture on the speaker seem to run too deep to even view himself. He cannot understand who he is because of this repressive culture permeating the world around him. The speaker hints at a sort of second-self in this strangeness. That the enjoyment is something foreign and outside of himself; that the speaker may even attempt to view these actions as performed by another person.

Yet again the speaker returns to medlars and sorb apples, the symbol for male sexual organs, directly referencing the “flux of Autumn” (48) which evokes an image of a flowing substance leaving an object. This can easily be seen as another allusion to the ejaculation of semen and continues with an image of fellatio: “Sucked out of your empty bladders / and sipped down” (49, 50). The speaker, though obviously emotionally torn by the world, and feeling complete isolation, continues to seek homoerotic companionship although remaining closeted. This vivid description of fellatio echoes earlier moments in the poem, reinforcing that this is, in fact, a look at how homoerotic relationships have created such an unsettling world in the mind of the speaker.

Then the poet links homoerotic experience with alcohol consumption: “perhaps, with a sip of Marsala” (50). This continues the Dionysus references from earlier in the poem, but also adds somewhat scary connotations of sexual desires being played out only under the guise of alcohol. This would seem that the speaker, although enjoying homoerotic relationships, may not be able to seek them out without some form of substance abuse to achieve it. Dionysus then cannot be a wholly pure reference to the frivolity and vivaciousness of the speaker, and instead casts some dark tones over the entire poem, as these references appear even earlier. The closing line of the poem evokes this dark image of inebriation and isolation with the line “Intoxication of final loneliness”. The closing on loneliness reveals how this feeling lingers and never can disappear and that this is brought about by intoxication or possibly the acts that follow. It speaks to the homosexual closeted and attempting to internalize the heteronormative culture of which it seems impossible to break out.

Throughout this poem the speaker struggles to understand his homoerotic feelings and gives a snapshot of what it can be like to live as a closeted gay man. The internal struggles for the speaker are divulged through the lens of external struggle—the travel through Hell. This poem gives almost no resolution or hope, instead standing firmly in place, and as such gives a sense that this problem is not moving anywhere in the modern society. In a broader prospective anyone with different feelings of sexuality, be they gay, lesbian, something in between, or different altogether, can understand the pain of living a closeted life. Being unable to enjoy oneself, except for brief moments, can give hope to anyone closeted that they are not alone in these feelings.

Sucking A Sorb-Apple: A Queer Reading of D. H. Lawrence (pdf)

Sucking A Sorb-Apple: A Queer Reading of D. H. Lawrence by RagnarokAngel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Pioneering New Serialized Shows in a Post-Bittorrent Landscape

For those of you unfamiliar with the circumstances behind Pioneer One I’ll try and give a brief rundown of why it is. It seems to have originated as a pipe-dream of fighting the man and going against the grain, though it could be as simple as a heavy DIY lean in the minds behind it as well as seeing an opportunity to hit the core market the hardest. The show, not film, takes the idea of serialized drama and latches onto Bittorrent firmly. It’s no surprise that it’s a science fiction show—the target fetish of the hardcore internet user—what other fans would be willing to take such a leap in media viewing habits? So the project started off as an idea of releasing a serialized drama directly to the swarm instead of going through syndication with a network. In my opinion this presents a couple of interesting challenges as well as solutions. First — money: how are you going to fund a large-scale serialization without all the mega-bucks of ads? Well the production crew of Pioneer One went and got themselves a kickstarter project and with a bit of help from the blogosphere and torrenters everywhere raised enough scratch to film the pilot. Distribution is the easiest bit of this as getting a forever seed isn’t impossible anymore. Getting a cast together is probably where the most issue is because without being able to attract even moderately established actors it can be a very mixed bag that show up to auditions. This isn’t to say that amateur or starting actors can’t be talented — they certainly can be — but they had to go with who they could. This ends up being a bit of a weakness in the pilot, not enough to be completely distracting, but the acting is on the low-end of good. It’s definitely not bad but it could be better, however many Pilots end up feeling over-acted so this could just be a general pilot failing.

Speaking of how the show actually is I am extremely happy with the outcome of the Pilot and very excited that the next 6 episodes have already been funded. This is definitely something worth watching. (Possible Spoilers from here on out)

Valve — Get yourself into linux already

I’ll start out with the simple — Valve had an awesome sale this week on L4D + L4D2 as a combo bundle ringing in nicely at $10.19, what a steal right? I should have snagged this deal because it was really too awesome to pass up. I didn’t because of not being able to play it on my linux box (my primary and secondary boxes now) and would have had to only play while at my parents. But at this price it should have been worth it.

The real kicker in all of this — my xbox360. I feel that the platform is far superior to that offered on the ps3 or wii (especially true as far as multiplayer gaming goes) and am generally happy with the exclusives that end up released for the system. I gripe a lot that the system is locked down hard and that accessories are a bundle and a half and end up not doing everything they say they will (stupid chatpad) but after all of it the actual gameplay is solid, and it works well. Xbox live is an excellent service (at a reasonable cost) and although there are a lot of people not worth dealing with on there it works very well for playing with a group of friends. But I can’t get this awesome deal for my xbox because the digital distribution for that platform is ramped up so high that it’s a joke to even consider. Deals on xbox live can save you about 1/3 the cost of a game, but never ever something in the ballpark of what Valve is offering here. In fact to buy a copy of L4D2 from Gamestop for my xbox360 (new) will set me back $30. That’s $20 more than buying both games, and getting all the DLC for free on steam. Valve understands how much word of mouth and friends playing sells games. Gifting and being able to play with a bunch of friends for a fraction of the price of buying it for just you continues to astound.

So why are people still even gaming on systems? First is barrier to enter — you have to have a pretty decent rig sinking a good chunk of change up front to build it. Ars September guides show that if you’ve got a monitor and peripherals you can build a nice rig for somewhere near the $4-500 range while in comparison a brand new Xbox 360 S will be ~$300 (cheaper if you go with older models). If you could custom build software to fit your hardware needs it might be possible to lower the cost to entry to PC building but that sort of development doesn’t exist for end users of widely available software (including games) whereas highly specialized systems and software can gain massive performance by being specifically designed to take advantage of the hardware. Still around $400 it would still seem the winner is the PC. Here is where it really all falls apart for me because I absolutely loved PC gaming as a kid and now end up only playing exclusives occasionally on it, moreso now that I’ve moved to linux for my daily computing.

Why can’t companies just understand that there is a market for the linux gamer? Hell there are already distros out there designed for linux gaming — and the ability to pare away a distro and free up everything unnecessary for play should make this even more enticing. Sony realizes that linux should be a part of it’s platform and (until recently) had an option to install it. I really think that a software platform like Steam should get some love in the linux space. Valve could go as far as to push it’s own linux variant custom designed to be run as a standalone game console with complete access to steam’s store. I can see a serious position for a distribution of this kind as many hobbyists would build a box and sit it behind their TVs, use their own preferred control systems, and generally have all the benefits of a living room console. Additionally add in a more traditional steam system and having access to the same games on all the computers as well as having dedicated hardware for gaming could see a huge surge in the number of people interested in this. Valve may not want to deal with the open source community and everything it comes with but opening up the actual software that powers the games could have great benefits as certain hardware architectures could get more customized builds to run on the hardware — this could then be moved to the games themselves becoming better equipped and written for the specific hardware that runs it. Add this in with the drag-and-drop respins that are available for a few mainstream linux operators and you have an extremely solid platform going on here. The thing about all of this is Valve already pushes for large community input and values those who create mods, going so far as to let them sell their work on the market. There are more than a few games that have solid popularity on Steam that began as simple mods for games, Killing Floor is just one example. Help out devs, help out the community, and kick down the door to why so many “can’t” or “won’t” try out linux. Imagine what could be possible if installing linux meant that you could migrate your digital game library with you, how many people would be much more willing to try this out?

Sintel-ating the Commons

My girlfriend and I broke with our current tradition of watching Breaking Bad at night and watched the newest pet project for the Blender foundation — Sintel. I’ve gotta say that this was another great short film that they’ve thrown their weight behind as I really enjoyed the other films as part of the Open Movie project. Sintel is a much more cohesive experience than Elephants Dream was though both are thought evoking and reach to extremely human experiences.  I don’t want to ruin the film for anyone so the plot of the film will not get discussed here — go watch it as it’s only 15 minutes (including end titles). Those Million views on youtube, somewhere near 5000 seeders from one tracker and 55k torrent downloads should be screaming that this has reached an exceptionally wide audience and bears your consideration at least.

What really grabs me is the depth of film that can come out of the “cult of the amateur” pervading our digital lifestyle. This is released so that anyone can remix it under a simple attribution license so you music video remixers you’ve got a nice swathe of epic battle footage to add into your videos now! Seriously though, having such high quality work released to the public at large is an amazing thing and flies in the face of what execs, and most recently Gene Simmons, have said about product. Blender is out to “protect” their brand just as much as Kiss but they can do it by giving the tools away for free and funding excellent projects like Sintel. This kind of stuff has been written about ad infinitum by other countless bloggers, advocacy groups, pirates, and all manner of the media.

The thing isn’t noticing that these projects exist — there’s an entire website devoted to these kinds of works at Vodo. There are plenty of films getting funding in novel ways, like The Tunnel‘s frame sales (which I think is excellent) or Pioneer One‘s kickstarter project (which has commenced a second round of funding, and a blog post all its own later). It’s realizing what can be done with them. Knitting them together, sharing them freely with your friends, screen printing stills on blank T-shirts, Adding funny speech bubbles, you name it you can do it. Rip it apart or build something new. And beyond that, in my opinion the greatest feature of the commons, make things that you can call your own. If after watching Sintel you have gained some sort of inspiration to create then please share it! Shared experiences and the continual blending of those which the individual finds important are the true value of the commons — the one that the detractors don’t find because they won’t walk among the lilies in the field. Some of the more activist type get this idea and apply it to everything (I really feel that it’s what’s driving the guys behind The Pirate Bay and the kopimists for instance) and some just decide that leaking their album or movie on bittorrent lets them walk in both worlds.

Stand up and take those values with you whole heartedly. Take a shaky step into the commons with those pieces you hold dear to yourself and let it wash over you as others share it with you. Go watch Sintel: Go create something.